This may seem grotesquely off-topic, but seeing how this list is
inhabited by folk who combine a concern with German Studies with some
measure of interest in technology, I raise it here regardless...
I like to analyse my Web server logs to see who accesses my materials
and from where. In particular, I'm interested by the search engines
people use and the queries they employ that lead them to my pages.
So if a user goes to www.ask.com and types in the query "What is the
fundamental difference between inclined plane and screw?" (as someone in
Australia indeed did yesterday), why does that much-lauded software
produce, from among all the millions of documents in its indices, my
1985 lecures on Thomas Mann before Der Zauberberg as its number one
suggestion for links that may answer that intriguing question?
One might also wonder why my antipodean visitor, having puzzlingly
enough thought that recommendation worth following, then spent around
twenty minutes reading my ancient screed before adding it to their
Internet Explorer "favorites". Could it be that the software behind
www.ask.com. far from being as useless as this performance would
initially seem to indicate, actually possesses psychic insight into the
true interests of its enquirers, and divines that a concern with
elementary mechanics is but a pretext behind which lurks a secret urge
to investigate Buddenbrooks? If so there's hope for all of us
old-fashioned humanists yet...
Michael
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Michael Beddow http://www.mbeddow.net/
XML and the Humanities: http://xml.lexilog.org.uk/
Linux in Schools: http://linux.lexilog.org.uk/
The Anglo-Norman Dictionary http://anglo-norman.net/
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