thought this was a good example of "seacrhing". kath An Egyptian Stumper for Google By Danny Sullivan, Editor The Search Engine Report A "simple" query that seems like a no-brainer for Google turns out to be an excellent illustration of why you can't find "everyting" on the Internet. A reader writes: Okay, here's the query. The student was studying ancient Egypt. As a part of her assignment,she had to find a recipe for egyptian funerary bread and bake some! Sounded like a good question for the internet to me. How wrong was I! I tried searching for 20 minutes and only found pages that referred to funerary bread, none gave the recipe. Frustratingly, some even mentioned that they'd found the recipe courtesy of the internet. I used some of your search tips, and, using Google, narrowed the search right down to: "egyptian funerary bread recipe" -greek -"the perfumed mummy" -"karen taylor project" In that query, "the perfumed mummy" and "karen taylor project" refer to pages that mention they'd found the recipe courtesy of the internet but which didn't have it, so I wanted to remove them. I got one hit, which didn't help. A. OK, I'll bite (pun intended). I went to Google and searched for: recipe for egyptian funerary bread. That "Karen Taylor" project page came up, looking so appealing at number three with this description: "In the oral presentations we were presented with Egyptian Funerary Bread to taste (recipe courtesy of the Internet)" Now here's a key search tip. That page mentions the recipe but doesn't list it. We could keep searching, but let's instead try something different. Can we find this Karen Taylor and just ask her? The Karen Taylor page doesn't list a contact address for her, but we could try asking the Department of Education for Western Australia, where she's apparently a teacher and which publishes the page. Can't wait? OK, let's keep hunting for Karen Taylor using Google: "Karen Taylor" Mirrabooka Primary School That query didn't work, so perhaps let's just find her school: "Mirrabooka Primary School" Turns out, Google found plenty of pages with links to the school web site, but the site no longer seems to exist (and no, the Google page cache feature won't resurrect it). No luck with AllTheWeb.com, either. But it was fairly easy to find a phone number for the school. Either a phone call to the school, or contacting the department of education, might have brought an answer about reaching Karen and getting that recipe. The key point here is to remember that search engines may be more useful to take you part of the way to an answer, where "old fashion" attempts like asking people the right question who know can take over. But hey, let's not give up on the web yet. Let's use a little search engine math, in the right places: recipe for egyptian "funerary bread" My thought here was that perhaps by going for "egyptian funerary bread recipe" as an exact phrase in your original query, you were getting too specific. The page you want might not have all those words in that exact order. So just phrasing "funerary bread" portion might be enough to get pages with that exact phrase and the other key words elsewhere on it. That query brought great looking results at Google, where number three promised: "Mission accomplished! i need the recipe for egyptian funerary." Whoops. Would you believe this is a complete spam page that redirects to a an Amazon affiliate selling electronics products. In fact, that query brings up tons of spam, and narrowing to "egyptian funerary bread" as an exact phrase didn't help, either. I then tried over on AllTheWeb.com, both ways, but nothing good seemed to come up. After striking out on two different search engines, it's time to bring in a meta search engine and query a bunch of them at once. Going to Vivisimo.com, I entered: "egyptian funerary bread" Two hits came back, that Karen Taylor project first and the second, a page with the actual recipe, as found on....wait for it....AOL Search, fed by Inktomi's results. This just goes to show that Google really doesn't always find everything right off, or more importantly, that different search engines have different "opinions" of the web. The same query used at a different search engine may come through for you, so consider shopping it around. Time to find -- about 15 minutes. Actually, it was a bit faster, but I kept stopping to make notes of what I was doing. Hope the bread tastes good! SearchDay May 28, 2002 - Number 276-77