Fun with Search Engines

Gregory Alan Bolcer (gbolcer@gambetta.ICS.uci.edu)
Tue, 06 Oct 1998 20:30:02 -0700


> I just did a search on pulse detonation engines and it looks like they are
> no longer highly classified...
>
"Don't classify me" was one of my favorite Fullerton punk
band songs growing up. 8-) Popular Science had an article
last year on a related technology for launching lightweight
satellites into orbit. I tried to look the FoRK post up
on AltaVista using +FoRK and +"Popular Scinece". It returned:

AltaVista knows the answer to this question:
Where can I ask science questions of
FORM [a geologist ] online? BUTTON [Answer]
[a gravity expert ]
[a mad scientist ]
[a Natural History or Native American curator ]
[a volcanologist ]
[an astromer ]
[an earth scientist ]
[an energy expert ]
[an oceanographer ]
[Dr. Universe ]
[How Things Work ]
[Jake, The Sea Dog, sea animals ]
[Mr. Science (general science) ]
[Professor Bubbles (must have been to Roy's B-day ]
[Science Whatzit! (general science) ]
[Scientific American ]
[The Mars Team ]
[The Physics Guy ]
[Wendell Worm (yucky stuff) ]

AltaVista found no document matching your
query.

Now there's a first. I think it pretty much fits the definition
of FoRK, except that I tried the search again with just
+"Popular Science" and got the same exact thing with finding
8376 WWW pages. I was going to draw some conclusions about
the classification of FoRK, except that just to be completely scientific
I tried -FoRK +"Popular Science" and got the same results, so
the only thing I can conclude is that FoRK and Popular Scinec4e
have nothing in common.

Anyways, I ended up finding an unsubscribe message from Joe, 8-)
http://www.egroups.com/list/fork/48.html

and my posting on "Wuthering Heights and Brilliant Pebbles"
which talks about the tests over the past 2 years on
pulsed infrared carbon-dioxide lasers as a means to launch
things into orbit.
http://xent.ics.uci.edu/FoRK-archive/jun98/0119.html

Greg

First to know, last to go.