Slashdot Mirror
What Isn't on the Internet?
An Anonymous Coward writes: "Every modern geek knows that one can find practically everything
on the Internet these days. In fact, I just realized today that
I have *never* not found anything I've searched for, barring things
that can't for some reason be released in such an environment, or
things that just don't exist, even off the 'net. I think it would be
interesting to find out what people have searched for that isn't
out there ... have any of you ever looked but come up dry?"
Last 40 years of billboard or gallup music chart positions. This definitely exists, but not (AFAIK) online.
"don't fall into the fallacy of believing that Perl can solve social problems. Maybe Perl 6 can, but that's a ways off"
I'm pretty sure that Miranda was the last name of the suspect, not the first name of the victim.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
So, once upon a time, it occurred to me that I know that Johnny Cash dresses in black, but I don't know *why*.
So I tried to find out.
I found a few dozen web sites devoted to "the man in black", but not a single one that explains when or why he picked up this particular quirk. Maybe it's out there, but it's too hard for a search engine to find.
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
There's a plant that grows wild in India, and parts of China, all over that part of the world. It's a variety of coleus, called "coleus forskohlii".
This plant is known to have many useful properties - it helps speed up nerve signaling a tad (useful for MS sufferers, such as myself), as well as helping asthma, and even lowering blood pressure. I can buy capsules containing a measured amount of dry plant, even standardized to a particular amount of the active chemical, forskolin. I can buy freeze-dried root. I can buy liquid extract of this plant.
I can get studies done that tell what climate and nutrients are needed to maximize the content of forskolin. I can find all of this on the web.
What I cannot find online is a source for the seeds, or live roots, or even live plants, so that I can actually *grow* this stuff for myself. Instead, to use this to help my multiple sclerosis, I must buy it already-made into something, either pills or capsules, at *incredible* markup.
As 60 capsules generally costs about $15, and, for MS, I'd need to take six daily (two at a time, three times a day), this adds up VERY fast. Factor in at I'm on disability, with *very* limited income, and it gets even more entertaining.
From my searching, I've seen that I am by far not the only person scouring the Web for this plant. Every site that has requests for plants, seems to have several people looking for this plant. I know it's available - not only are the places that sell capsules able to grow it, but the people who've done the studies on growing it had to have live plants.
But if it's available on the Web, no search engine I've yet seen can find it.
Lemon curry?
On a somewhat related note--have you ever (by accident or on purpose) conducted a websearch for something that doesn't *really* exist...and found it anyway?
I discovered this phenomenon the other morning. Here are some examples of things I've found that don't exist:
You know, try as I might, I just can't seem to find some free, legal, quality pornography online.
It false under the "free, legal, quality -- choose two" rule:
free and legal - But then it's never quality. Who would actually dedicate their time and bandwidth to archiving quality pornography for others to view? It's like Gnutella -- too many people downloading, too few uploading.
free and quality - This is typically inspired by a strage fetish for something illegal, such as child pornography or papparazzi shots of celebrities. People are obsessive enough to waste their time collecting this stuff, but only because they're so desparate to find it themselves (after all, it's illegal).
legal and quality - Do I really need to say it? You get what you pay for. If somebody puts up a quality archive of legal pornography -- a precious commodity; one that people are willing to pay for -- how long can it be before money corrupts and they're off with their credit card billing, mass spam advertising, and hundreds of pop-up windows?
I look forward to seeing any dissenting views. It's a win-win situation for us all =)
-- Imagine how much more advanced our technology would be if we had eight fingers per hand.
Even google couldn't find this one.
There's no shortage of historical information on the net, but if you want in depth analysis of some historical issue or other, you basically have to go and look in a library.
In fact, I often find that Xrefer does a better job of answering historical or philosophical questions than a generic web search. Since Xrefer is just [free beer] access to a collection of reference books, that isn't really very encouraging.
Basically, the net is great for breadth, but for non-geek disciplines, the depth is often lacking. We need to shrink copyright terms down to at most 5 or 10 years. That might help :)
Fixing copyright
I've searched for online texts of books that have been pulled by their publishers, and scored 1 for 2. I easily found the book *Hitman*, pulled by its publisher after a lawsuit was filed against them because the book was found in the possession of someone who had killed someone else in a manner similar to that described in the book. It was a small survivalist publisher, who didn't have the money to defend themselves even though it's obvious that they'd win in court--First Amendment, ey. I guess you only have rights if you can afford to pay for the upkeep. Anyway, the book was worthless tripe about how to become a contrct killer, and nothing mentioned in it isn't intuitively obvious to anyone with more then three neurons. Hardly worth the time, but I wanted a copy of this "banned" book on principle.
The "banned" book I could not find online was *The Rage*, written by Stephen King under the pseudonym "Bachman" back when the market was too saturated with King novels and he didn't want to put out that many more for a while, but kept writing voluminously anyway. It was later published under King's own name in a collection of all the books written under that pseudonym, called *The Bachman Books*. But the novel was found in the locker of a high school kid who was involved in a school shooting, and King decided to have the publisher yank the book. I went looking for a scanned-in text of it online, figuring I wouldn't be taking money out of anyone's pocket since the book is permanently out of stock and out of print. Nada. Of course, a quick search of eBay yields a ton of second-hand copies, so if I really wanted to I could buy one and OCR it onto the Net myself. But, I was surprised that no one has done so, considering that it is no longer available except second-hand anyway.
"The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws."--Tacitus, *The Annals*
It's kind of obscure, but I spent hours searching for images of the "totems" from Zork: Grand Inquisitor to no avail. They've got to be out there somewhere, but damned if I can't find them.
Plus, there have been numerous occasions where I'd remember a specific web page, and even whole phrases from the webpage, and couldn't find my way back to it from any search engine. That really sucks because you know its out there, you just can't find it. And it never fails this happens just after the entry from when you first visited it has expired from your history.
NO CARRIER
Feelable Porn
Thanks for the great idea! I'm looking for more Freudian slips. . .
Curious George
***General Consultant to the Human Race*** My opinions are free. You get what you pay for.
There's a shortage of full-text scientific papers on the internet. Even as a subscriber to several full-text services and journals, I can never seem to find online scientific papers that appear in journals that my university library doesn't have.
I know that journals want to make money by selling them, but scientific papers ARE public domain, and why should I have to pay to read them (in sometimes very poor quality - on microfilm/fiche).