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| log | 2000 | 06 | 17
... which is important for the looking and finding
I've been told more than once I should have been a librarian.

Now, it's not like there's any monetary success that is granted you for having a librarian's skills or mindset, but the thing that librarians do for a living is something that I naturally do just because that's the sort of guy I am.

I know how to find things, and I know how to sort things. Now, the problem with me sorting things is that I tend to sort them in an ideosyncratic way, ('cept my CD collection, which is alphabetical by artist, chronological within each artist, with classical works separated out, sorted by composer) and generally I'm the only one to whom my sorting makes sense. Actually, that's not quite true. I've found that other people who have the same understanding of the things I'm sorting think that my sorting method is quite natural and fitting. This means that I sort for experts, I guess.

Anyway, the point of me bringing this up isn't the sorting, it's the finding. The web is all about finding stuff. I've maintained ever since I started on the web (five years ago now, with some Netscape 2.x version on my old mac) that the secret to using the web is knowing when to use a search engine, when to use an index, and how to make either of them tell you what it is you want without burying it under all the crad you don't want.

Now, it's generally agreed upon that the expert's favorite search engine is Google nowadays, since they have a pretty slick way of weeding out the stuff you don't want - they weight their results based on how many links there are to any given result, with the bonus that pages that are themselves highly weighted count for more in this linking game. I like Google. You can search for "fedward" on Google and it'll take you here. :-) The drawback with Google is you can't do or searches, and doing stuff like a near search means you have to enter the various permutations manually and try them out - for instance, if you want to look for somebody's name (Leonard Bernstein, pulling a name out of a hat) on Google, if you just enter Leonard Bernstein in the search field you'll get back results that include pages of names where both Leonard and Bernstein appear, but not limited to the specific one you're looking for. In order to get the composer/conductor/pianist, you have to search for "Leonard Bernstein" and "Bernstein, Leonard" (with the quotation marks) both, manually.

So. For people searches, I found a while back that HotBot offered among its search options (that pulldown menu being my favorite web search tool for several months after it came out) one for the Person, which has the effect of doing both of the above at once. But without the weighting of Google, so it's not my first choice. That pulldown is still pretty cool, since you can tell it which kind of search to perform without having to remember if it's one where you do and or use a plus sign, or what.

Since it doesn't take very long to run through these things for what I'm trying to find, anytime I hit HotBot I also hit Alta Vista (I remember when it was new, the first search engine to index every word on every page it found, and still at altavista.digital.com). I don't like it anymore though. It got dumbed down and co-branded too many times, and I'm really annoyed by all the links for whatever their vendors are. I'm too irritated by this to even go look now just so I can paste them in, actually I'm not:

Ugh. So I don't really use Alta Vista anymore. Oddly, I do use their shopping.com for price comparisons, but even that doesn't work particularly well. They don't categorize things the way I would.

And then there are the days when you just want an index. I've always loved Yahoo! (their exclamation point, not mine), in large part because a human had to go look at all the links before they got on their index, and due to the laziness, intractability, and overworkedness of their particular humans most of the links they had were ones that had warranted the effort of linking them, which made them slightly more worthwhile. In the pre-Google days, you didn't have cred if you weren't on Yahoo!. (I'm putting a period after that exclamation point because I'm not into ending sentences with exclamation points, and that's not an exclamatory sentence). Number two in this regard is Excite, and I never even look at any of the other portals because they all stink. Yahoo! is the best, Excite is my Number Two, and all of the rest are also-rans. Sorry, Lycos, Go, GoTo, Snap, and whoever else you are. Searching for Leonard Bernstein on Yahoo! is pretty much guaranteed to take you to some worthwhile pages.

Anyway, I bring all this up because I got an email this morning from my sister involving something called a domain tag on a domain a group she does web stuff for is going to host. It's a .org.uk domain, and Em said she'd never heard of this domain tag thing, neither had her org's ISP, and did I know what it was? She went in the right direction asking if it was specific to .org.uk domains but she didn't research this herself.

I didn't know a thing about it, but I have my trusty search engines and about 10 minutes later I had her answer along with several sites for her to check out. I've done this for other people, too. I'm a finder. And none of this is anything that seems particularly difficult to me (it all seems terribly obvious, really) so it's strange to me that other people don't do it already. So I looked it up, found out that the domain tag is something unique to .uk domains, and that it represents the responsible registrar within the .uk system. I pointed her to how to solve her problem and went on my way.

Indeed, it seems I could have been a librarian.

Oh, and an unrelated note to Koog:

IIRC, it was this exchange on a listserv:

Annoying Person 1, commenting on driving in Canada and seeing signs with the abbreviation OPP (Ontario Provincial Police, IIRC): "Hee! The Canadian highways are down with OPP!"
Annoying Person 2: "I thought that too! Great minds think alike!"
Me: "... and fools seldom differ."
Koog (in a private email): "Damn you for beating me to it."

Certain persons who read this diary may even remember who the specific annoying people referenced above are. I will say no more.

link (2000-06-17)

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