And neither can anyone else, since the short flightless waterfowl only live in the Southern Hemisphere.
We interrupt the normal discourse on Google, Yahoo, MSN, Microsoft, Ask Jeeves, SEO, SEM, PPC, and the societal impact of blogs and blogging on humanity to bring you this unintentional bit of humor.
Phil Bradley posted in his blog his thoughts on a Silicon.com interview with Mike Lynch, founder of UK-based Autonomy. Mr. Bradley notes how Autonomy’s founder thinks little of how “Google has dumbed down searching and uses an example of someone who needs to know about the effect of oil pollution on the penguin population of Alaska simply typing in ‘penguin’.”
This looked like someone was making a silly remark, so I visited the page containing the interview at Silicon.com’s web site. Perhaps this was an example of British humor. But maybe it isn’t. Here’s the quote from Dr. Lynch:
“Say I’m interested in the effect of oil pollution on the penguin population of Alaska. Although that’s the idea someone is looking for they will walk up to a search engine and just type ‘penguin’.”
“They would never walk up to a librarian and just say ‘penguin’. And that’s the Google effect. We’ve been trained to assume the search engine is dumb and that takes a little un-training in enterprise.”
For those who may have missed the movie “March of the Penguins,” the second-highest grossing documentary ever, this past summer, the effect of oil pollution on penguins in Alaska would be zero since they don’t live there. Penguins live in several locations in the Southern Hemisphere.
Perhaps some kind person at Google will send Dr. Lynch a couple of theater passes to a local showing of “March of the Penguins.” It’s a great movie.
David Utter is a staff writer for Murdok covering technology and business. Email him here.
