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Joe Pug: Bury Me Far From My Uniform

What's Wrong With...? (Fun With Google)

Sometimes Google's auto-suggest feature produces interesting, amusing, and even vaguely poetic results. The other day I was looking for the blog What's Wrong With the World, which I read occasionally but haven't bookmarked, and this was Google's attempt to be helpful (click on the image to enlarge it):

WhatsWrongWith
Assuming these are ranked according to the number of requests made for them, it's interesting that more people asked "What's wrong with me?" than "What's wrong with the world?"

As I began to type "the," "What's wrong with the world?" moved up in the list.

WhatsWrongWithTh
I'm a little puzzled by some of those and am guessing that "What's wrong with the beer we got?" is a song title.... Oh no--it's an Alabama state legislator.

 

Sigh.

Actually I don't recall that legislation having anything to do with German immigrants but rather with the general interest in higher-quality beers than Budweiser etc.; the bill permitted the sale of beer with higher alcohol content than the standard 4% or whatever it is.

The guy at xkcd seems to have done a lengthy investigation using queries beginning with "Why." You can see the result here.

I should warn you not to start playing with this. It's very addictive.

Comments

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I could probably write an essay about most of those topics--or at least a blog post--but I won't.

AMDG

The whys? Or the what's wrongs? Or both?

The what's wrongs. I haven't had a chance to look at the whys, and I make it a general rule not to look at xkcd at work. ;-)

AMDG

Probably a good policy. In this case the contra-indication would be that you could spend an awful lot of time looking at the graphic. It contains a *whole* lot of "whys".

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