3 ms·

I don't think the story is meant to convey truthiness, but kind of a silly story. Maybe something about leaky abstractions or the perils of black-box thinking?

• dalke 12y ago
  Norvig writes: "The point of this story is that if it had happened today, my friend would not have had to spend months in the lab; he could have spent minutes on Google instead. " This view is almost irrelevant. 40 years ago all of this information was available through commercial chemical information providers, like CAS (Chemical Abstracts Service) and ISI (Institute for Scientific Information). Both started computerizing their search services in the 1960s. In fact, if you look at the early history you'll see that information retrieval and chemistry search were very closely coupled; several of the IR pioneers worked with CAS, and the term "information retrieval" itself was first used at a chemistry conference. Even without computers, a good chemistry library would have had a copy of the Beilstein Handbook of Organic Chemistry, with this information. Asimov even wrote a short story in the 1950s based on the ubiquity of 'Beilstein' in chemistry - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What%27s_in_a_Name%3F http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What%27s_in_a_Name%3F . At best, Norvig's story is a retelling of Westheimer’s Discovery: "A month in the laboratory can often save an hour in the library." Only it puts the glory on Google, as if IR were a recent advance in chemistry. That's why I think it's a tall tale, with no basis in reality, but meant to impart the underlying truthiness that Google is a great IR engine. And yet, it isn't. Try using Google to find information about the chemical compound under discussion. Only a chemist could do it, because the chemist knows how to convert the structure into a chemical name - Google doesn't accept chemical structures as input - and any chemist who can extract a compound from whiskey would know how to search specialized chemistry databases.