First, let me clarify my comment about appreciating that I was just not
sent to Google. John Mallinckrodt, my comment was actually for John Denker,
who sometimes does simply send people there. My words were meant as a thank
you to John Denker for seeing that I really did have a problem with how to
answer the question on "wet" roads in dry weather.
And thanks to you John Mallinckrodt for putting me on to posing questions
in Google. I will definitely keep that in mind for future reference.
However, it still looked for all of the words in the question, "why does
the road look wet". And it will try to make a perfect match. In this case
it only comes up with one match.
I actually prefer Alta Vista, but I also use Google regularly, too.
Interestingly enough, the other search engines that I have tried really do
not add much, if anything, to what I get from these two.
Some time ago, Alta Vista was actually using "natural language" querying.
At least it suggested trying to ask questions. But this apparently is no
longer the case for either them nor for Google. My guess is that the
algorithms for parsing a real question are just not good enough yet. This
probably means that we still do not have a real grasp on how humans think.
But that gets us into a whole other area of discussion.
On another tangent, I know that I have not been real vocal on PHYS-L but I
have been a member for some time. I was not on at the actual start, but I
did become a member when it was still a Bitnet list. I recall of actually
writing and posting a simple BASIC program to un-encode UUE and XXE files
so that we could exchange files via email. Now that is long ago, but really
only about a dozen years ago!
Please excuse the walk down memory's lane on this rainy Spring vacation day.