begin quoting Bob La Quey as of Thu, Sep 13, 2007 at 07:58:25PM -0700: > On 9/13/07, Stewart Stremler <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > begin quoting Tracy R Reed as of Thu, Sep 13, 2007 at 05:07:16PM -0700: > > [snip] > > > On the contrary I still find that google can find what I need very > > > quickly and I use it several times every day. The usefulness of google > > > seems unchanged to me. > > > > Google is turning into my preferred index into wikipedia. Google is > > pretty fast at finding wikipedia pages... > > Take a look at Googlepedia. It replaces the adds with > the Wikipedia page corresponding to the search term. I am > using it experimentally but so far I like it. > > https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/search?q=googlepedia&status=4
I'll do that when I get a stable version of Firefox up. Thanks. > > For finding actual useful (non-wikipedia) content, it may be better than > > most of the other search engines, but most of my queries do not return > > satisfactory answers. "Google is the best" is faint praise. > > "It is a poor workman blame his tools." as mom used to say. Y'know, I hate that aphorism, it's insulting and condescending. A good workman uses good tools, after all, and will not put up with poor tools. He'll throw 'em away. So... on an idle whim, I searched. And whaddya know... Google came through for me here, I found http://www.phrases.org.uk/bulletin_board/18/messages/587.html which says: ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- Re: "A poor tradesman always blames his tools" Posted by masakim on January 28, 2003 at 21:39:44: In Reply to: "A poor tradesman always blames his tools" posted by Sean on January 28, 2003 : Greetings. I was looking for the origin of this saying. I was particularly interested in the approximate date of its appearance in the language. : Thanks, Sean Mauves ovriers ne trovera ja bon hostill. [A bad workman will never find a good tool.] (French proverb, late 13th C. ) A bungler cannot find (or fit himselfe with) good tooles. (R. Congrave, _French-English Dictionary_, 1611) Never had ill workman good tooles. (G. Herbert, _Outlandish Proverbs_, 1640) 'Tis an ill workman that quarrels with his own tools. (D'Urfey, tr. _Don Quixote_, 1696) They say an ill workman never had good tools. (J. Swift, _Polite Conversation_, 1738) Good workmen never quarrel with their tools. (Byron, _Don Juan_, 1818) It is proverbial that the bad workman never yet had a good tool. (S. Smiles, _Self-Help_, 1859) General Bildering . says it is only a bad workman who quarrels with his tools and repudiates Kuropatkin's criticism of the rank and file. (_The Japan Times_, 1907) I've read somewhere that a poor workman quarrels with his tools. (J.G. Cozens, _Ask Me Tomorrow_, 1940) Damn! Dropped the screwdriver.. Bad workmen blame their tools. (A. Fox, _Threat Signal Red_, 1979) ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- ....which provides a variety of interpretations and phrasings. Interesting. > Seriously if you are not finding stuff it may be that > you simply don't use relevant terms (or enough of them.) Oh, I'm sure of it. I use the terms that seem relevent to *me*. Alas, my view of the world only sometimes aligns with that of everyone else. > My main bitch is not that I do not find stuff but that > I have to look deeper into the links returned than I used > to. Partly this is just that the web has grown, partly gaming > Google, and partly the real fact that search is still not > good enough. I am also not willing to dig through more than three or four pages of results before trying a new query. Impatience is probably the enemy. > There is also the fact that in many areas good stuff is still > not really open but requires one subscribe to various sources. > I am thinking medical here. It seems many medical journals are > bundled up behind costly proprietary services. This is an intrinsic downside of the web. Usenet, for example, distributes the information -- but that's not necessarily a better approach. After all, spam originated on Usenet. Everything's a tradeoff. > Perhaps an example of something that you are looking for but > cannot find easily would be a good challenge for the group. Next time I get stumped, I'll try writing down what I'm looking for and what I've tried. It might prove interesting. -- Asking on IRC is the fastest way to get a decent google hit. Stewart Stremler -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-list
