Searching for the truth

Two searching events this afternoon.

In the course of reading the book at reference 1, probably brought to my attention by the EAORC bulletin, I come across a substantial account of the substantial, three and a half thousand year old earthwork in Louisiana called 'Poverty Point'. I felt sure that I had come across this place in the recent past. Tried various blog searches, going back some years, to no avail. Checked with Wikipedia to see if that gave me a clue. No good. But then I tried searching the archive, held as Word files, for 'poverty point', giving me a dozen or more hits, with the first, from November last year, turning out to be the right one. I think the problem was that blog search did not recognise either poverty or point when within the larger phrase 'Poverty_Point', with neither word appearing en clair. Windows search, of Word files anyway, is not so fussy.

It did not occur to me to ask gmail for the date of the relevant bulletin and work from there.

Which all goes to remind me that indexing, keywording and searching is not as easy as might at first appear. See reference 2.

Then, a bit later, I had occasion to want to inquire about trains and so I put 'network rail journey planner' into Bing, a search key I must have given it many times. And every time something put together by trainline (of reference 3) comes up as hit one. Occasionally one clicks on it by mistake. I can only suppose that the trainline people pay Microsoft enough (and probably Google too) to make sure that they are always put at the top of the list, even though it would not be difficult for them to work out what I actually wanted. Tedious.

PS: the Poverty Point site is plenty important enough for archaeologists to worry about the right balance between access to the general public and preservation for posterity. So regular debates about whether the steps snapped above are appropriate.

References

Reference 1: The Dawn of Everything: A new history of humanity – David Wengrow, David Graeber – 2021.

Reference 2: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2021/11/new-world-earthworks.html.

Reference 3: https://www.thetrainline.com/. The wrong place.

Reference 4: https://www.nationalrail.co.uk/. The right place.