[Coco] [Fwd: FW: Google secret revealed!]

[Ward Griffiths]

On Saturday 10 April 2004 04:01 am, Bob wrote:
> --- Aaron Banerjee <spam_proof at worldnet.att.net> wrote:
> > > I wonder if Google will ever oursource their web searching jobs
> > > to IPC's (Indian Pigeon Clusters).
> >
> >    That article is right up there with the WOM (Write Only Memory)
> > which came out sometime in the '70s.
> >           - Aaron Banerjee
>
> Well, I got a grin out of it, and something useful, too. Since I was
> already reading Google, I clicked some more and learned that you can
> use Google as a calculator and convertor. Type in a math expression
> and it will calulate it. Type in "ounces in a pound" and it will tell
> you there are 16 ounces in a pound. Cool! Type in a phone number and
> it will show you a map to the fraekin' address (sometimes)!! Scary
> cool!

Most of that is a front-end for the dc and units programs that have been 
part of Unix (and hence Linux, which Google is built on) since almost 
Day One.  The phone-map thing is a bit trickier, as that draws on some 
more recent tools.
-- 
Ward Griffiths    wdg3rd at comcast.net    http://home.comcast.net/~wdg3rd/

And this was no disciplined march; it was a stampede--a stampede
gigantic and terrible--without order and without a goal, six million
people _unarmed_ and unprovisioned, driving headlong.  It was the
beginning of the rout of civilisation, of the massacre of mankind.
			Herbert George Wells, _The War of the Worlds_