Monday, November 17, 2008

What is the future of questions?

So as just a random thought I decided to google on "questions". I got about 861 million results.

The top result was a link for a Twenty Questions toy - that would be a paid link, and not too interesting.

The second result was a link to Wikipedia, not much of a surprize, but boy was that a dreary Wikipedia entry. I was expecting a dissertation on the Socratic method but it was only briefly mentioned.

The third result was a link to asnwerbag.com where people ask questions - not very interesting ones from my quick wander through - and other people answer these questions - not experts in any particular subject, just people. The answers were just about as interesting as the questions.

The rest of the results on the first page were discussion questions for people learning English as a second language, job interview questions, advice on how to ask questions to technical people (them being only illusionary humans), and an intriguing FAQ from the American Internal Revenue Agency. This means the number of googles on the IRS FAQ list must be incredibly huge for the page to rank that high in google results.

The other interesting part of the google result was "Searches related to:" area which included a suggested search for "answers". That search resulted in only 389 million results. So there are at least twice as many hits for "questions" as there are for "answers". I think there's a life lesson in there somewhere.

And just to compound the feeling that there are more questions than answers in life, the fourth result in the list was for "Google Answers" the text for this hit started out: "We're sorry, but Google Answers has been retired, and is no longer accepting..." Well, that's us told.

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