What weird searches you made randomly that lead to unexpected things/places?
Recently I was bored and decided to search on amazon if it was possible to order a large idiot. Surprised enough, amazon did give me results for the book "the idiot" (large print) by Fyodor Dostoyevsky (I have never read anything made by Dostoyevsky, but now I am curious). So maybe I am going to read in the near future something I've never heard about and came by random search. What are your similar stories?
5 replies
For me, this usually happens when I'm looking for a particular book or doing research for one of my YouTube videos.
Case in point: Marginalia Search
I was making a video recently about Google alternatives and this one came up. It's weird and has an oddly specific use case: it's great at finding vintage websites, and this can be very useful if you have to repair something that is very old. (Or just need a whole different set of results for some reason, which is easy to achieve when your index is non-commercial.)
Anything on TV Tropes ends up going down a rabbit hole
LaTeX still surprises me sometimes but then I quickly realize.
Same with rust you gotta put docs/lang or you get a wiki or forums which are about something else.
I was searching YouTube for “corona ball” which is a metal sphere you stick on the end of a transmitting antenna. This was in 2020, so I got this instead, which lives rent free in my head now.
google "chubby drill".