Uh, Mark, I think you introduced yourself to Google as (Mr.) "Mark Weiss
Poetry," an unusally tri-ethnic name, and probably unheard of among those
doctors and lawyers (if I read your father's druthers right). Try "Mark
Weiss" poetry?

I've become addicted to search-engine testing myself--interesting little
quirks and idiosyncrasies they each have, almost as if they think
differently--and have even compiled a list of "searching names" that differ
not only in terms of their commonness (or not), but also to the degree that
I know anything about one or more individuals named such-and-such. Another
factor I stumbled up against early on (in my pre-inhaling days) is the
plethora of things other than persons that may bear a given name. When I
first tested an engine with one name that I knew belonged to a family of 4
(all living, and in the same place) with a famous dead relative of the same
name but from the other US coast, I thought I was in pretty good control of
the control factors--until I got hundreds of hits because, unknown to me but
probably familiar to many of you, it's also the name of an apparently very
popular video game (duh). And don't even get me started on how many
different meanings of "near" these engines seem to operate on....

What's also interesting (to me anyway) is how often the "less is more" rule
seems to apply, such as when a first-and-last name yields no matches, but
the last name alone tosses up the right (first-named) person. Or when
searching a name at least one instance of which can be localized to a city,
but getting that person-hit (and in the right city) only via a statewide
search. It's like having to hypnotize somebody to recover an accurate memory
of, say, a crime scene. Makes me want to write a book called The Digital
Unconscious (dedicated to Fred Jameson, of course)--unless somebody's
already written it--

Sorry, gotta GO

Candice



> I did try the google egosearch, spurred by Peter's adventure. "Mark Weiss
> Poetry" yielded nothing, Mark Weiss poem yielded two, plain old Mark Weiss
> yielded a lot more, among the practitioners of professions that would have
> made my father happier.