9 ms·

Before Google, Who Knew?

122 points by bhaumik 12y ago

sparkzilla 12y ago
I'm a bit confused by this article because Google can't actually answer the complex questions that the librarians have received. Google's "knowledge graph" can answer simple questions, based on scraped Wikipedia data, and the core part of the site (the search engine) presents users with a semi-random set of links, basically telling them to find the answer on someone else's site. It's like a librarian that knows a little bit of info (but not quite enough) who then tells you which part of the library to go to find a book that may or many not have the answer to your question. A site like Quora is better for answering complex questions. IMHO, the "knowledge graph" actually shows that Google is very poor at determining the implied questions people are asking, and exposed the failures of alogorithmic search in general: http://newslines.org/blog/googles-black-hole/ http://newslines.org/blog/googles-black-hole/
- jyrkesh 12y ago
  The article doesn't even mention the Knowledge Graph. It's using just referring to the fact that Google is still the first place you go to ask those questions. Usually, the answer resides somewhere in the first page of results. I asked Google "will a poisonous snake die if it bites itself?" Results include Quora, Yahoo Answers, a Youtube video of a snake actually doing it, and HowStuffWorks. So no "Google" doesn't know, but I'm going to ask Google when I want to answer a question.
  - sparkzilla 12y ago
    >Usually, the answer resides somewhere in the first page of results. And that's the business opportunity.
- xyzzyz 12y ago
  I guess the point of the article is that now you find answers to these questions _using_ Google, and not necessarily get answers from Google itself. Also, while Google Knowledge Graph cannot answer complex questions given as examples in the article, until quite recently it couldn't even answer simple questions it is able to answer now. I wonder how long will it take until it is able to answer the questions from the article.
  - sparkzilla 12y ago
    I think Google can't answer complex queries because it cannot understand the question, because the answers to the questions are generally created by humans, and are not easily scraped from other sites. So it seems likely that Google will buy Quora, or make an equivalent.
    - bhaumik 12y ago
      I'd attempt to acquire/"make" a Wolfram clone before looking into Quora. http://www.wolframalpha.com/examples/ http://www.wolframalpha.com/examples/
- minthd 12y ago
  While quora sometimes gives good answers, often you get no answers at all. And don't forget the time issue - quora is quite slow.
- 7952 12y ago
  I am skeptical about the entire premise of software like Google answering questions more complicated than research for school reports. Any sufficiently interesting question can be answered better by humans. Questions with simple answers often require more nuance to properly understand the answer. For example if you ask the population of a city. When was the census, and how exactly was the edge of the city defined? To make information usable you need to understand the source. Complex questions have multiple sources that may be incomaptible in forming an answer to a question. Without strict standards for representing knowledge I doubt Google have sufficient data to do anything groundbreaking outside of a few small areas.
u8mybrownies 12y ago
love this article... thanks for sharing
corin_ 12y ago
I was channel surfing on TV yesterday and flicked onto one of the Harry Potter films, to hear Hermione saying she researched something in the library and couldn't find a single reference - my immediate thought before moving on a channel was that (assuming I don't have her magical skills), I would have no idea how to research something in a library without either the internet, or asking other people who might know where I could find the answers. (I say no idea - obviously on a basic level it wouldn't be hard to start by finding all books on the rough topic, reading them, etc.... but to do it with any sort of efficiency as opposed to so slowly that I'd end up beating myself to death with a hardcover.)
- digi_owl 12y ago
  Funny, that's pretty much how i do it online as well. Read article after article until i have a reasonable grasp of the topic i was looking into.
- slantyyz 12y ago
  That's a fascinating perspective. When I was growing up in the 70s and 80s, we were taught how to use a card catalog and later, microfiche for finding stuff in the library. While I was still in university up until the earliest 90s, I was still using microfiche for research.
  - corin_ 12y ago
    I was born in 1990 - I spent my childhood in libraries for fiction, and I guess occasionally for extremely basic "research" for school projects, but at an age when "research" was enough to look up a book on the topic I needed to know about, that probably was at least partially a picture book, then borrow that and go home with my mum... Have fond memories of both card catalogs and microfiche, but only really for finding novels I wanted.
- femto 12y ago
  > .... but to do it with any sort of efficiency as opposed to so slowly that I'd end up beating myself to death with a hardcover. I'd say you have the process down pat. It really was a matter of spending half a day locating a candidate set of books in the subject catalogue, writing down their details, then walking all over campus to locate the books in the various branch libraries and reading the relevant section of each to see if it was what you wanted. The only reason people didn't beat themselves to death with a hardcover was because they didn't know any better, because there was no better. (Mind you, from a Body Mass Index perceptive, the old way was better!)
kazinator 12y ago
> "Can you tell me the thickness of a U.S. Postage stamp with the glue on it? Answer: We couldn't tell you that answer quickly. Why don't you try the Post Office? Response: This is the Post Office. (1963)" Haha! An inexpensive caliper gauge, available in any specialty tool outlet, could yield an instant empirical answer to within about 10 microns.
- irremediable 12y ago
  I suspect the inter-stamp variability might be a little bigger than that.
  - VLM 12y ago
    That's how you can tell someone was trolling the library, decades later. Because the stamps came in boxes, so a box of 10K consisting of 1K sheets was 8 inches thick so 8/1000th of an inch (all made up numbers). My wife is the daughter of a postmaster and by osmosis she knows these things, life in a rural post office isn't always as exciting as a Bukowski novel so this kind of thing has been discussed. There were spools of stamps at various times so that might be a puzzling math problem. On the table in front of me is 1000 sheets of laserprinter paper in two packages about 4 inches thick so 4/1000ths of an inch for letter size 20 pound paper.
    - anigbrowl 12y ago
      Ha, I came to the same conclusion about it being a prank before spotting your comment.
  - kazinator 12y ago
    You would think so, but it's surprising how consistent paper is! For instance, I've measured various papers with a caliper (pages of a book, samples of laser printer paper, ...) and it's amazing how consistent it is.
    - irremediable 12y ago
btipling 12y ago
I am one of those programmers who doesn't have a computer science background. Instead I have an MLS (and an undergrad anthropology degree) and thus though myself am not a librarian have some idea of the value librarians provide. For one thing librarians try to satisfy the information need of a patron. This is different than answering the question asked, which even now search engines can't really do well yet. Google search is powerful but you're searching an unfathomably large index and your query is a key. What librarians do is try to understand the exact thing you want to know, which you may not even know when you asked the question. Often a librarian will respond to a question with a question. A librarian will also continue to help until the problem has been solved for the patron. They'll encourage a patron who might feel discouraged. Librarians treat people as people, not as queries. Librarians are also staunch defenders of privacy and information freedom. In America, librarians are professionals with a code of ethics, which is codified by the American Library Association. Librarians are taught the complex issues involving privacy, the chill effect. Librarians are not in the business of collecting your personal information or selling you advertising. Librarians fight censorship, and they fight to protect your privacy. Librarians are supremely excellent at curating. Go to a Barnes & Nobles and look at the selection of children's books. Read some of them. Then go to your local library's children's section and read some of those books. It's night and day. Libraries are filled with amazingly valuable books that, especially in the case of children's books, address important issues, are beautiful and beautifully written. They're not stories about Barbie rescuing a fashion show, they're about relatable and enjoyable characters that discover the world around them, learning to understand themselves. Having said all this there are considerable problems in the American librarian profession which turned me off to it. Librarians were slow to react to digital content, which put them at a disadvantage on digital rights management issues. Walking into a public library can for some be like a time warp to 20 years ago, with volumes of books filling shelves everywhere. There's a reason for that, books can be lent out. By sticking to books librarians haven't been the force they should have been in fighting DRM and copyright laws that would enable access to digital information to more people. Libraries spend considerable amounts of money for highly protected digital content like JSTOR. Librarianship as a profession is also one dominated by time in service type of seniority. I wanted to be a programmer at a library. I was a programmer at a library as an undergraduate student and there were librarians who programmed to manage the library's website and library. But coming out of MLS the unfortunate reality was that programming jobs are jobs that go to librarians with seniority. I would have had to man a reference desk for a decade. And that kind of advancement, where it isn't skill, but time spent warming a seat that gives you political power is just not for me. Finally, it's not clear what the future of libraries will be. Fewer and fewer people are reading books. Libraries are very popular places, especially for children, but in many cases libraries are just places that have a computer or a meeting room. Public librarians don't seem to have an answer for what's to come.
jstanek 12y ago
It's nice to see DuckDuckGo mentioned at the end as on-par with Google, Siri, and OnStar. I'm a little surprised they mentioned DDG in the first place, as it doesn't have nearly the name recognition as Bing or Yahoo search.
Homunculiheaded 12y ago
One thing that this article fails to point out is how often librarians were wrong before Google. In 1986 there was a study[0] that showed that across the board reference librarians were only correct about 55% of the time. I think most people today would consider a query answering system that had an accuracy of 55% to be an interesting curiosity, but certainly not ready for real-world application. It's funny how frequently we measure machine learning performance of an "easy for humans" task and fail to compare it to human accuracy on the same data. We just assume humans would do perfectly on it. I'm sure there are a few MNIST digits that I would get wrong. [0] P.Hernon, C McClure "Unobtrusive Reference Testing: The 55 Percent Rule," Library Journal, 111 April 15,1986
- brudgers 12y ago
  How often are less than 55% of the results of a Google search relevant? Count ads.
  - corin_ 12y ago
    That' s not comparable at all. 55% of answers were correct, not 50% of the possible material in the library was relevant.
    - brudgers 12y ago
      If a search for something like "crane hook design principles" returns a page with "buy crane hook design principles for less" at the top, it is wrong. And wronger than the wrong of a librarian because it's not even trying to be correct, just thrown out there for the edge case. We just happen to write it off as "that's just Google".
      - estel 12y ago
        I don't think that's entirely fair. Surely the most useful measure of "wrong" is whether the user comes away with the correct answer? Adverts on a webpage might definitely make it less likely that a user comes away with that answer, but I don't think they'd invalidate a user's successful result any more than gossiping with the librarian would invalidate their help if they successfully find an answer.
jrochkind1 12y ago
As a librarian-programmer, I continue to find it interesting how interested HN is in libraries/librarians. I wonder what that's about? Seriously, I'm not entirely sure and wonder. Some kind of nostalgia for the 'information technology' of pre-computing society? (Personally, while I still work in libraries, I share btipling's [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8781169 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8781169] general lack of optimism about the future of libraries, alas.)
femto 12y ago
I'd say that before Google, "AltaVista knew". In my experience, it was AltaVista that transformed the web/Internet from a collection of disparate sites to a single place that you went for answers to questions. Before AltaVista, I used to write the URL for any useful web and ftp servers that I found in a logbook, so I could find them again. Getting an answer was a matter of looking up the logbook, deciding which website might have the required information, then typing the URL into my browser. After AltaVista the logbook fell into disuse, as locating information was a matter of typing a few well chosen keywords into AltaVista and visiting a few of its top hits. Google took over from AltaVista, but at the time it felt like Google was a "better AltaVista" than something completely new.
- jmnicolas 12y ago
  Maybe I didn't know about Alta Vista at the time, I can't remember the search engines I was using back then, but what I remember is that every single search was returning thousands of porn results. Google was a revelation, it actually found things !
  - saraid216 12y ago
    I used Dogpile, which searched about 5 engines and gave you the results for all of them.
  - bsder 12y ago
    So did AltaVista. And, AltaVista actually showed you a clustermap of results keywords that you could refine. So, if you typed in "python" you would see a clustermap of results that included a bunch of herpetology in that cluster and a bunch of computer science in that cluster, etc. I still miss that.
    - antman 12y ago
      Here you are: http://search.carrotsearch.com/carrot2-webapp/search?source=web&view=folders&skin=fancy-compact&query=python&results=100&algorithm=lingo3g&EToolsDocumentSource.country=ALL&EToolsDocumentSource.language=ALL&EToolsDocumentSource.customerId=&EToolsDocumentSource.safeSearch=false http://search.carrotsearch.com/carrot2-webapp/search?source=...
anigbrowl 12y ago
Can you tell me the thickness of a U.S. Postage stamp with the glue on it? Answer: We couldn't tell you that answer quickly. Why don't you try the Post Office? Response: This is the Post Office. (1963) This has a strong odor of trolling to it - one wonders how many questions directed at librarians were genuine vs. mischievous. I'm also struck by the failure to provide an answer rather than suggest a method, eg 'use a calipers to make precise measures of physical objects. If it is too difficult to measure a single stamp, measure a block of multiple sheets and divide your result by the number of sheets.'
- Zenst 12y ago
  The other question that jumped out like that one was in a trolling context, though probably was real in that timeframe was "And there was this typewritten note found on a cataloguing card: Telephone call mid-afternoon New Year's Day, 1967: Somewhat uncertain female voice: "I have two questions. The first is sort of an etiquette one. I went to a New Year's Eve party and unexpectedly stayed over. I don't really know the hosts. Ought I to send a thank-you note? Second. When you meet a fellow and you know he's worth twenty-seven million dollars — because that's what they told me, twenty-seven million, and you know his nationality, how do you find out his name?" I do not feel even Google today could handle that.
  - greggarious 12y ago
    Sounds like a question for Dan Savage.
brandonheato 12y ago
So wouldn't the world be a better place for everyone if all the librarians in the world posted everything to a searchable quora/stackoverflow shared knowledge base? Instead of having knowledge fragmented and buried deep in places where people would have trouble finding.
- walterbell 12y ago
  The better to obsolete you with, my dear. The challenge of every "knowledge management" system ever invented, including Google Answers, which paid (!) for answers.
  - Girgio31 12y ago
    Wow, the times are changing fast.

122 points by bhaumik 12y ago

I'm a bit confused by this article because Google can't actually answer the complex questions that the librarians have received. Google's "knowledge graph" can answer simple questions, based on scraped Wikipedia data, and the core part of the site (the search engine) presents users with a semi-random set of links, basically telling them to find the answer on someone else's site. It's like a librarian that knows a little bit of info (but not quite enough) who then tells you which part of the library to go to find a book that may or many not have the answer to your question. A site like Quora is better for answering complex questions. IMHO, the "knowledge graph" actually shows that Google is very poor at determining the implied questions people are asking, and exposed the failures of alogorithmic search in general: http://newslines.org/blog/googles-black-hole/ http://newslines.org/blog/googles-black-hole/

jyrkesh 12y ago
The article doesn't even mention the Knowledge Graph. It's using just referring to the fact that Google is still the first place you go to ask those questions. Usually, the answer resides somewhere in the first page of results. I asked Google "will a poisonous snake die if it bites itself?" Results include Quora, Yahoo Answers, a Youtube video of a snake actually doing it, and HowStuffWorks. So no "Google" doesn't know, but I'm going to ask Google when I want to answer a question.
- sparkzilla 12y ago
  >Usually, the answer resides somewhere in the first page of results. And that's the business opportunity.
xyzzyz 12y ago
I guess the point of the article is that now you find answers to these questions _using_ Google, and not necessarily get answers from Google itself. Also, while Google Knowledge Graph cannot answer complex questions given as examples in the article, until quite recently it couldn't even answer simple questions it is able to answer now. I wonder how long will it take until it is able to answer the questions from the article.
- sparkzilla 12y ago
  I think Google can't answer complex queries because it cannot understand the question, because the answers to the questions are generally created by humans, and are not easily scraped from other sites. So it seems likely that Google will buy Quora, or make an equivalent.
  - bhaumik 12y ago
    I'd attempt to acquire/"make" a Wolfram clone before looking into Quora. http://www.wolframalpha.com/examples/ http://www.wolframalpha.com/examples/
minthd 12y ago
While quora sometimes gives good answers, often you get no answers at all. And don't forget the time issue - quora is quite slow.
7952 12y ago
I am skeptical about the entire premise of software like Google answering questions more complicated than research for school reports. Any sufficiently interesting question can be answered better by humans. Questions with simple answers often require more nuance to properly understand the answer. For example if you ask the population of a city. When was the census, and how exactly was the edge of the city defined? To make information usable you need to understand the source. Complex questions have multiple sources that may be incomaptible in forming an answer to a question. Without strict standards for representing knowledge I doubt Google have sufficient data to do anything groundbreaking outside of a few small areas.

u8mybrownies 12y ago

love this article... thanks for sharing

corin_ 12y ago

I was channel surfing on TV yesterday and flicked onto one of the Harry Potter films, to hear Hermione saying she researched something in the library and couldn't find a single reference - my immediate thought before moving on a channel was that (assuming I don't have her magical skills), I would have no idea how to research something in a library without either the internet, or asking other people who might know where I could find the answers. (I say no idea - obviously on a basic level it wouldn't be hard to start by finding all books on the rough topic, reading them, etc.... but to do it with any sort of efficiency as opposed to so slowly that I'd end up beating myself to death with a hardcover.)

digi_owl 12y ago
Funny, that's pretty much how i do it online as well. Read article after article until i have a reasonable grasp of the topic i was looking into.
slantyyz 12y ago
That's a fascinating perspective. When I was growing up in the 70s and 80s, we were taught how to use a card catalog and later, microfiche for finding stuff in the library. While I was still in university up until the earliest 90s, I was still using microfiche for research.
- corin_ 12y ago
  I was born in 1990 - I spent my childhood in libraries for fiction, and I guess occasionally for extremely basic "research" for school projects, but at an age when "research" was enough to look up a book on the topic I needed to know about, that probably was at least partially a picture book, then borrow that and go home with my mum... Have fond memories of both card catalogs and microfiche, but only really for finding novels I wanted.
femto 12y ago
> .... but to do it with any sort of efficiency as opposed to so slowly that I'd end up beating myself to death with a hardcover. I'd say you have the process down pat. It really was a matter of spending half a day locating a candidate set of books in the subject catalogue, writing down their details, then walking all over campus to locate the books in the various branch libraries and reading the relevant section of each to see if it was what you wanted. The only reason people didn't beat themselves to death with a hardcover was because they didn't know any better, because there was no better. (Mind you, from a Body Mass Index perceptive, the old way was better!)

kazinator 12y ago

> "Can you tell me the thickness of a U.S. Postage stamp with the glue on it? Answer: We couldn't tell you that answer quickly. Why don't you try the Post Office? Response: This is the Post Office. (1963)" Haha! An inexpensive caliper gauge, available in any specialty tool outlet, could yield an instant empirical answer to within about 10 microns.

irremediable 12y ago
I suspect the inter-stamp variability might be a little bigger than that.
- VLM 12y ago
  That's how you can tell someone was trolling the library, decades later. Because the stamps came in boxes, so a box of 10K consisting of 1K sheets was 8 inches thick so 8/1000th of an inch (all made up numbers). My wife is the daughter of a postmaster and by osmosis she knows these things, life in a rural post office isn't always as exciting as a Bukowski novel so this kind of thing has been discussed. There were spools of stamps at various times so that might be a puzzling math problem. On the table in front of me is 1000 sheets of laserprinter paper in two packages about 4 inches thick so 4/1000ths of an inch for letter size 20 pound paper.
  - anigbrowl 12y ago
    Ha, I came to the same conclusion about it being a prank before spotting your comment.
- kazinator 12y ago
  You would think so, but it's surprising how consistent paper is! For instance, I've measured various papers with a caliper (pages of a book, samples of laser printer paper, ...) and it's amazing how consistent it is.
  - irremediable 12y ago

btipling 12y ago

I am one of those programmers who doesn't have a computer science background. Instead I have an MLS (and an undergrad anthropology degree) and thus though myself am not a librarian have some idea of the value librarians provide. For one thing librarians try to satisfy the information need of a patron. This is different than answering the question asked, which even now search engines can't really do well yet. Google search is powerful but you're searching an unfathomably large index and your query is a key. What librarians do is try to understand the exact thing you want to know, which you may not even know when you asked the question. Often a librarian will respond to a question with a question. A librarian will also continue to help until the problem has been solved for the patron. They'll encourage a patron who might feel discouraged. Librarians treat people as people, not as queries. Librarians are also staunch defenders of privacy and information freedom. In America, librarians are professionals with a code of ethics, which is codified by the American Library Association. Librarians are taught the complex issues involving privacy, the chill effect. Librarians are not in the business of collecting your personal information or selling you advertising. Librarians fight censorship, and they fight to protect your privacy. Librarians are supremely excellent at curating. Go to a Barnes & Nobles and look at the selection of children's books. Read some of them. Then go to your local library's children's section and read some of those books. It's night and day. Libraries are filled with amazingly valuable books that, especially in the case of children's books, address important issues, are beautiful and beautifully written. They're not stories about Barbie rescuing a fashion show, they're about relatable and enjoyable characters that discover the world around them, learning to understand themselves. Having said all this there are considerable problems in the American librarian profession which turned me off to it. Librarians were slow to react to digital content, which put them at a disadvantage on digital rights management issues. Walking into a public library can for some be like a time warp to 20 years ago, with volumes of books filling shelves everywhere. There's a reason for that, books can be lent out. By sticking to books librarians haven't been the force they should have been in fighting DRM and copyright laws that would enable access to digital information to more people. Libraries spend considerable amounts of money for highly protected digital content like JSTOR. Librarianship as a profession is also one dominated by time in service type of seniority. I wanted to be a programmer at a library. I was a programmer at a library as an undergraduate student and there were librarians who programmed to manage the library's website and library. But coming out of MLS the unfortunate reality was that programming jobs are jobs that go to librarians with seniority. I would have had to man a reference desk for a decade. And that kind of advancement, where it isn't skill, but time spent warming a seat that gives you political power is just not for me. Finally, it's not clear what the future of libraries will be. Fewer and fewer people are reading books. Libraries are very popular places, especially for children, but in many cases libraries are just places that have a computer or a meeting room. Public librarians don't seem to have an answer for what's to come.

jstanek 12y ago

It's nice to see DuckDuckGo mentioned at the end as on-par with Google, Siri, and OnStar. I'm a little surprised they mentioned DDG in the first place, as it doesn't have nearly the name recognition as Bing or Yahoo search.

Homunculiheaded 12y ago

One thing that this article fails to point out is how often librarians were wrong before Google. In 1986 there was a study[0] that showed that across the board reference librarians were only correct about 55% of the time. I think most people today would consider a query answering system that had an accuracy of 55% to be an interesting curiosity, but certainly not ready for real-world application. It's funny how frequently we measure machine learning performance of an "easy for humans" task and fail to compare it to human accuracy on the same data. We just assume humans would do perfectly on it. I'm sure there are a few MNIST digits that I would get wrong. [0] P.Hernon, C McClure "Unobtrusive Reference Testing: The 55 Percent Rule," Library Journal, 111 April 15,1986

brudgers 12y ago
How often are less than 55% of the results of a Google search relevant? Count ads.
- corin_ 12y ago
  That' s not comparable at all. 55% of answers were correct, not 50% of the possible material in the library was relevant.
  - brudgers 12y ago
    If a search for something like "crane hook design principles" returns a page with "buy crane hook design principles for less" at the top, it is wrong. And wronger than the wrong of a librarian because it's not even trying to be correct, just thrown out there for the edge case. We just happen to write it off as "that's just Google".
    - estel 12y ago
      I don't think that's entirely fair. Surely the most useful measure of "wrong" is whether the user comes away with the correct answer? Adverts on a webpage might definitely make it less likely that a user comes away with that answer, but I don't think they'd invalidate a user's successful result any more than gossiping with the librarian would invalidate their help if they successfully find an answer.

jrochkind1 12y ago

As a librarian-programmer, I continue to find it interesting how interested HN is in libraries/librarians. I wonder what that's about? Seriously, I'm not entirely sure and wonder. Some kind of nostalgia for the 'information technology' of pre-computing society? (Personally, while I still work in libraries, I share btipling's [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8781169 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8781169] general lack of optimism about the future of libraries, alas.)

femto 12y ago

I'd say that before Google, "AltaVista knew". In my experience, it was AltaVista that transformed the web/Internet from a collection of disparate sites to a single place that you went for answers to questions. Before AltaVista, I used to write the URL for any useful web and ftp servers that I found in a logbook, so I could find them again. Getting an answer was a matter of looking up the logbook, deciding which website might have the required information, then typing the URL into my browser. After AltaVista the logbook fell into disuse, as locating information was a matter of typing a few well chosen keywords into AltaVista and visiting a few of its top hits. Google took over from AltaVista, but at the time it felt like Google was a "better AltaVista" than something completely new.

jmnicolas 12y ago
Maybe I didn't know about Alta Vista at the time, I can't remember the search engines I was using back then, but what I remember is that every single search was returning thousands of porn results. Google was a revelation, it actually found things !
- saraid216 12y ago
  I used Dogpile, which searched about 5 engines and gave you the results for all of them.
- bsder 12y ago
  So did AltaVista. And, AltaVista actually showed you a clustermap of results keywords that you could refine. So, if you typed in "python" you would see a clustermap of results that included a bunch of herpetology in that cluster and a bunch of computer science in that cluster, etc. I still miss that.
  - antman 12y ago
    Here you are: http://search.carrotsearch.com/carrot2-webapp/search?source=web&view=folders&skin=fancy-compact&query=python&results=100&algorithm=lingo3g&EToolsDocumentSource.country=ALL&EToolsDocumentSource.language=ALL&EToolsDocumentSource.customerId=&EToolsDocumentSource.safeSearch=false http://search.carrotsearch.com/carrot2-webapp/search?source=...

anigbrowl 12y ago

Can you tell me the thickness of a U.S. Postage stamp with the glue on it? Answer: We couldn't tell you that answer quickly. Why don't you try the Post Office? Response: This is the Post Office. (1963) This has a strong odor of trolling to it - one wonders how many questions directed at librarians were genuine vs. mischievous. I'm also struck by the failure to provide an answer rather than suggest a method, eg 'use a calipers to make precise measures of physical objects. If it is too difficult to measure a single stamp, measure a block of multiple sheets and divide your result by the number of sheets.'

Zenst 12y ago
The other question that jumped out like that one was in a trolling context, though probably was real in that timeframe was "And there was this typewritten note found on a cataloguing card: Telephone call mid-afternoon New Year's Day, 1967: Somewhat uncertain female voice: "I have two questions. The first is sort of an etiquette one. I went to a New Year's Eve party and unexpectedly stayed over. I don't really know the hosts. Ought I to send a thank-you note? Second. When you meet a fellow and you know he's worth twenty-seven million dollars — because that's what they told me, twenty-seven million, and you know his nationality, how do you find out his name?" I do not feel even Google today could handle that.
- greggarious 12y ago
  Sounds like a question for Dan Savage.

brandonheato 12y ago

So wouldn't the world be a better place for everyone if all the librarians in the world posted everything to a searchable quora/stackoverflow shared knowledge base? Instead of having knowledge fragmented and buried deep in places where people would have trouble finding.

walterbell 12y ago
The better to obsolete you with, my dear. The challenge of every "knowledge management" system ever invented, including Google Answers, which paid (!) for answers.
- Girgio31 12y ago
  Wow, the times are changing fast.