

Ask HN: What takes you too long to find? - gusgordon

For example, PHP functions or car specs. If there was one thing you could find more quickly, what would it be? All of your answers will help me a lot, so thanks!
======
DanBC
A) In the 1980s there was a rabies scare in the UK. There was a TV series
about rabies; a man tried to extort money by threatening to import rabies and
release infected foxes.

i) What was the name of that TV series?

ii) Are there any newspaper reports about that man and his scheme?

B) Recently on british tv (probably BBC) there was a programme about people
(possibly Indian?) who lived by reclaiming gold.

i) What is this tv programme called

ii) BONUS: Is there an on-demand legal playback for this programme? Is there a
transcript for this programme?

(it is Welcome to India (<http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01n8278>) )

C) I watched a movie / tv programme.

i) What was the song played during that scene?

ii) What make of watch was the character wearing?

D) ALMOST ANYTHING USING AMAZON'S SEARCH TAKES FAR FAR TOO LONG AND IT IS A
_HATEFUL_ EXPERIENCE (apologies to any Amazoners reading this, but come on,
the search is broken.)

E) I want a new spectacles case. I want it to be really freaking nice. I'm not
sure what I want, but I'd know it when I saw it. I think I want something
machined from a lump of aluminium / aluminum or a nice titanium shell. A
solid, well made, box.

i) How can I find the case I want, while avoiding the SEO'd warehouses of bulk
cheap and nasty glasses case websites?

I have lots of examples of things that take me too long to find. I used to
know how to tweak the search query to get Google to give me better results.
I've lost that ability, and the tweaking sometimes takes me longer than I'm
interested in the subject. Sometimes I go back with a fresh mind and the tweak
is obvious.

I'll keep a list of queries that don't work. (And the fixed query if I find
it.)

~~~
DanBC
To follow up for any Googlers reading:

"Word order matters" - but [black cats site:com] is the same as [site:com
black cats]

Small words (a, the) now matter, when they didn't use to.

> _"Punctuation that Google ignores: ¶, £, €, ©, ®, ÷, §, %, (), @, ?, !"_

Except [£10 in €] gives me the conversion tools.

Google used to not ignore brackets. [+garden +(chair OR lounger)] (Yes, I know
that + is now not used to force inclusion and that "quotes" are used instead.)

Google does have various blogs to keep up with that stuff.

\---

Another thing that was hard to find:

F) During the English "expenses scandal" of UK MPs an MP was accused of odd
expenses claims, and she then got media training to reply to her accusers. She
claimed the cost of that training on expenses.

i) Who was that MP?

ii) What newspaper was it in? (I think Telegraph, but I'm not sure.)

~~~
gusgordon
Also, Google ignores capitalization.

------
DanBC
Approaching this from a different direction: It's hard to search for
information when you have almost nothing to go on.

See these Reddit posts for example:
([http://www.reddit.com/r/Whatisthis/comments/14521p/inherited...](http://www.reddit.com/r/Whatisthis/comments/14521p/inherited_after_my_grandma_passed_away_any_ideas/))

([http://www.reddit.com/r/Whatisthis/comments/13ih3j/what_is_t...](http://www.reddit.com/r/Whatisthis/comments/13ih3j/what_is_this_found_in_a_desk_drawer_at_work/))

([http://www.reddit.com/r/Whatisthis/comments/13df8g/any_idea_...](http://www.reddit.com/r/Whatisthis/comments/13df8g/any_idea_what_this_is_besides_a_bad_ass_lion/))

With these you're basically crowd-sourcing, and hoping someone somewhere has
seen it before. (Although 'jecniencikn' does quite well with the badass lion.)

------
SarahKay
Food I like that's on the way to where I'm going.

Example: I'm in San Francisco and am driving back to home to the peninsula and
I want to have dinner on the way. I'm out of my area of knowledge, and there
are probably tons of good restaurants that I'd like that are right on my way,
but it takes too long to find them. Prohibitively long, in fact, because
usually I just drive back home and eat somewhere near my house rather than hop
back and forth between Yelp and the map on my phone for fifteen minutes.

Another example: I'm on a driving trip and I want to eat at one of the
restaurant chains I like that's near the interstate. I'd happily wait 90
minutes if I could eat at a place I like, but I don't have any way of knowing
whether something is coming. And searching for all the acceptable restaurants
in all the upcoming towns isn't really reasonable.

------
johnkeegan1
Faceted product search across multiple sites is broken. Try to find for
example corner electric fireplace media units in white (furniture). 1\. You
get Googles own shopping results without facets 2\. You get individual ecom
sites with tons of false positives including discontinued items 3\. If you're
lucky you get to Google image search and work from there.

------
jetupper
Clothes.

When I see something I like being worn by someone else (either in pictures or
in real life), but I have no idea what is that type of clothing called.

Plus the number of online stores that I know of is limited, doing searches on
Google typically don't yield good results.

Social shopping sites? Too much noise in there.

------
acesubido
A job posting - not postings from a recruiter or third-party agencies.

------
gue5t
straight links to media files, it usually takes like four clicks, and that's
if I make a good query to start with

~~~
rpm4321
Do you mean like pirated avis and mp3s? I think the difficulty in finding DDLs
is partly a feature. If they are easy to find, they get DMCAed immediately.

------
mflindell
Cheaper insurance, Women, Keys

~~~
rpm4321
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Lya292wdpo>

