NetResearch: Search Stories
NetResearch: Search StoriesHave you had an interesting experience while searching online? Tell me about it. The best stories will be posted here. I've included a few of my own stories to get things started. They emphasize the use of intuition in locating things: a major goal of NetResearch.
- by Dan
My wife received a mysterious letter last month. It arrived in an envelope with no return address, postmarked from Santa Ana, California. Inside was a full-page ad torn from an unidentifiable newspaper, hawking a fad diet featuring a dubious weight-loss product. A big celebrity's face adorned the ad. In the upper left corner, my wife's name was handwritten, followed by, "Try it. It works!"
My wife and I puzzled over who would play a weird prank like this. Was it an old boyfriend being spiteful? A psycho stalker? Eventually we gave up and forgot about it. But a month later, a random acquaintance told us she had received the exact same letter... addressed to her 8-year-old daughter! We were floored. So I tried to find a connection.
I started at AltaVista, searching for a combination of my wife's name and the girl's name, to see if they both appeared in a list somewhere online. No dice. HotBot didn't find anything either.
My next idea was: maybe there is no connection between the two women, and maybe lots of women have received this mailing. If so, people probably would discuss an event like this, perhaps on Usenet, so I went to Deja News to search through old Usenet archives. I tried searching for the product name, "Berry Trim Plus," first in the "new" database (past 3 months of news), and then in the "old" news archives. In the old archives, I found it: a long conversation about these letters! Apparently, women have been receiving them anonymously for at least 10 years, their names (possibly) obtained from junk mailing lists.
Thanks to the Net, we now know that we aren't being stalked by some weirdo, but were just the latest targets of a bizarre marketing campaign.
- by Dan
Mary (not her real name) is a professor at a well-known university, and her lab is full of undergraduate students working as research assistants. At the end of the fall semester, Mary received an unexpected email message stating that all of her students were being given F grades in her lab. This was clearly incorrect and the result of (guess what?) a computer error at the registrar's office.
So, Mary responded to the email message, pointing out the error. Almost immediately, she received a computer-generated reply stating that the office was closed until after Christmas vacation. Annoyed, she phoned the registrar's office and got a recorded message saying the same thing. This was a dilemma. Even though Mary could change the grades next week, she knew that her hardworking students would be horrified and alarmed to receive the unexpected F's, and the high morale in her lab could be damaged.
Since all grades were due to be mailed to the students the next day, Mary knew that somebody had to be at the registrar's office preparing the grades. She was just about to drive to the university and break down the registrar's door when she ran into me and explained the dilemma.
Mary showed me the email message and I noted the address of the sender: smithj@some.famous.edu. From this we deduced that the sender was probably "J. Smith." Using Netscape Navigator, we connected to the university's main web page and used its X.500 directory to locate the registrar's office. One of the office's employees was named "Jane Smith," and her direct phone extension was listed! Mary called the number, and unbelievably, Ms. Smith answered. Five minutes later, the erroneous grades were fixed. The students never saw them.
- by Dan
When my PC blew its video board, the vendor shipped me a replacement part. When it arrived, however, it was the wrong part, so I shipped it back to the vendor via United Parcel Service (UPS), with a tracking number.
The next day, I phoned the vendor to tell them about the mistake. They put me on hold to check the status of the shipment with UPS. A few minutes later, they informed me that UPS had no record of my return shipment!
That didn't seem right. So I did a search for "UPS" on the web and located the package tracking page at www.ups.com. I typed in the tracking number, and voila, the package did exist in UPS's records and was still in transit. The PC vendor was wrong, and I had proof. This saved me a lot of worry, and the vendor realized their mistake.
- by Dan
In my business, I once received an order from the Netherlands. The order was handwritten and sloppy, and unfortunately I could not read the buyer's shipping address. The buyer gave his email address, name@someplace.nl, so I sent him a question about the address, but several weeks later, he still had not responded. What to do?
Taking a guess from his email address, I tried connecting to the Web site http://www.someplace.nl, and luckily, it existed. Not only that, but the site had a searchable database of its users' mailing addresses! I typed the buyer's name and waited for the results.
The search reported that there was no such person. Darn. It seemed like
there was nothing left to do... until I had an idea. Looking at several other
people in the database, I realized that their postal addresses followed
a certain format of words followed by numbers. Once I saw
the pattern, it was not hard to look at the buyer's sloppy address and
determine which scribbles were letters and which were numbers. From there,
I figured out the shipping address.