MSN has expanded its Instant Answers search feature to include sports statistics, weather, politician information, and holiday customs. MSN can even tell you how many licks it takes to get to the center of a Tootsie Roll Pop, if you know how to ask the question.
MSN Instant Answers Team member Mark Stumpf won’t be stumped (get it?) about any these topics. He writes on the MSN Search Blog that 1 million more facts have been added “for your querying pleasure.”
Stumpf provides query examples like [babe ruth home runs], [peyton manning passing yards 2003], [average temperature in January in Michigan], [defense minister of India], and [Christmas eve customs].
That’s great and every thing, but what about the question we’ve all wanted an answer to for the past 35 years? How many licks does it take to get to the center of a Tootsie Roll Pop?
Sorry MSN, but if you ask a direct question (which children often do), your search results were no help at all. The top result has something to do with mazes. The second one is a link to where I can buy a “Lick-O-Meter” to measure it for myself. The other eight results were more of the same. But if you take the query out of question form, the results are really good.
So how do the other engines/sources measure up?
Yahoo’s results were sort of relevant, but no real answers were given until the 6th result and it’s provided by Google Answers (in the vicinity of 300 licks). Now that’s funny.
Google and Wikipedia on the other hand, got me a bit closer to the answer. The Google+Search” class=”bluelink”>top result on Google took me to a site that outlined several different studies done at various universities on the subject. The answers ranged from 252 licks to 411 licks, but no one seemed to agree.
On Wikipedia, the mystery is explored in depth, revealing that at least 20,000 children have conducted experiments (including this one-my count was 1353) since 1970. All had varying results between 100 and 5,800, with an average of 600-800.
Yes, the world may never know indeed.
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