Seven Sons

I’m a pretty good Google search user. I know a lot of the tricks and keywords, and I know how to access the special searches (for music, for source code, etc).  Mostly I have just learned how to phrase a search to get a high probability of success. But every once in a while I spend a few minutes looking for something specific, and fail. For example, I haven’t been able to find:

1. The name of something when all I can remember about it is what the thing does and the letter it starts with. The other day I was trying to find a kind of floor jack that starts with the letter “s.” Google couldn’t help. I still don’t know what it is.

Photo credit: Bill the stick maker

2. A video of the greyhounds catching the mechanical rabbit. It came up in a conversation one day, and someone said, “I’ll bet there is a video on that on the web.” Turns out there isn’t, or else Google just can’t find it.

3. How much electricity I am using at any given moment in my house. No, wait! They are working on a Google device that can do that! But that leads me to…

4. How much water I am using at any given moment in my house.

A simple electrical circuit

5. The history behind why electrical current is indicated by the letter i on a circuit diagram. This came up in a conversation years ago, pre-Google, because a colleague swore that current should be represented by the letter c. He had a textbook from the 1920’s that proved his point, and he further claimed that because his source was older than mine (a more recent textbook), his answer was superior. I went to the library, found a citation using the letter i from a 19th century textbook, and proudly presented it to him the next day. I can’t seem to find any similar sources or a history of the symbol selection on the web using Google. And yes I did find the answer at WikiHow or Yahoo Answers or something but I think those answers are crap.

I’ll challenge readers to find any of these things, or to report the Google search failures you have had.