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IBM Targets UFOs, Ghosts, and Goblins With Search Tool
coondoggie writes "IBM wants to help you find out if UFOs are real. Well, sort of. With UFO sightings seemingly on the rise, Big Blue is teaming with The Anomalies Network to offer UFO Crawler, a new search engine specifically tuned to search for information about the paranormal, unexplained or just plain bizarre. The search tool employs IBM's OmniFind Yahoo! Edition enterprise search software and the UFO Crawler should help users precisely target and gather information from relevant sources, including thousands of documents and files collected in the vast Anomalies Network archive, as well as multiple global resources across the Web on topics such as such as ghosts, conspiracy theories and extraterrestrials."
While I understand that this is probably good for pageviews and thus revenue, do we really have to encourage these people?
That's what they want you to do!
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
It is called capitalism. IBM has a service for "tuned" search engines. Some organization was willing to pay IBM to tune it for paranormal searches. IBM took their cash.
I;'d argue it is a wonderful allocation of resources. Idiots gave their money away. Intelligent people will then get to use it for something more purposeful. What is wrong with that?
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
I'm a trained Ufologist and I'm thinking I would NEVER trust a search engine from IBM - that would be like giving me a UFO search engine written by the US gov't. I *KNOW* where the files I need to see are - they are in gov't bldgs at Area 51 and I don't need a search engine to tell me that.
Hmmmmm, a searchable "Wall of Weird", cool.
I think the distinction is that while intelligent, civilization-forming extraterrestrial life may be not only real but abundant on cosmic scales, the likelihood that any intelligent lifeform smart enough to develop an economical method of traveling interstellar distances within a reasonable timeframe would have any desire to come to Earth is exceedingly low. And even if they did, it further stands to reason that they would either interfere with us outright, or be completely undetectable, that any experiments they performed would not be half-assed jobs that left people running around with partial memories chatting about it, and they would certainly not be allied with, much less occasionally overpowered by, the US government/military.
UFOs exist, that is a fact. A UFO is by definition an unidentified flying object. Hundreds of cases of aerial objects that can't be immediately identified have been reliably documented (and by qualified observers).
What you choose to "believe" or not believe is what UFOs represent. If your position is that it would be irrational to assume these represent alien spacecraft, then the correct statement would be "you always had to be a real "YAHOO!" to believe UFOs were alien spacecraft."
Conspiracy theories don't work like that. Conspiracy theories employ a sort of reverse Occam's Razor: do not accept the simplest logical explanation if a needlessly complicated conspiracy can be made to fit the same facts.
Wow man, it's a good thing you aren't one of those "crazies" that you talk about or you would have posted some bizarre rant about one world government and interdimensional beings instead of this well-thought-out rational discourse.
Maybe we could use it to find Duke Nukem Forever
Havoc Video
If it was shot down, it would also lose the F, and it would just be an O.
I'm a scientician with a BS in ufology! We should team up!
Want a a business plan?
1. Attract gullible people around paranormal search engine.
2. Use advertisement space to sell magnetic healing jewlery, talismans, tin-foil hats and other crap.
3. Profit!
"It's too bad that stupidity isn't painful." - Anton LaVey