Ok, so I seem to have killed the thread with my third link. Mea culpa, and all that, but that link was in the New Scientist magazine in their humourous section at the end. I thought it was funny.

The point that I, and the owners of that website, want to make is that it is so easy to find what you want by looking it up in Google.com

To find the two song lyrics I used these search terms:

Redgum "last frontier"

Redgum "gladstone pier"

Hint: use double quotes around the words you want to appear together in that order, i.e. you don't want an article about how to rebuild a house pier written by someone in Gladstone, Queensland. You do want an article which has the words Gladstone Pier next to each other in that order.

A search using:    gladstone pier

gives 99,500 hits but

A search using:    "gladstone pier"

gives 64 hits - which is a lot easier to wade through.

Hint 2: if you don't find what you want first go, think of another set of search terms. If you want to narrow down the search because you got a million or so hits, add another word to the search box. Think laterally. Is there another word which you could use instead of the first one you thought of?

Hint 3: if you are looking for the name of a song or the rest of the lyrics try picking out some unusual bits of the song that are distinctive. The hardest things to find are the ones with very common words like "and" "the" or any of the thousands of common words we use in everything we say and write. Try searching for information about the band called "The Cure" for instance. Google ignores "the" even in the double quotes. You have to add something distinctive to narrow it down to the band.

For example:

Gladstone Pier

He was a sailor
Swarthy lean and proud
He could take a schooner through a big sea swell
Aloof in the mainland crowd

In this song I would start by choosing:

"swarthy lean and proud"

or even just the three words separately:

swarthy lean proud

but that gives 8,960 hits which you would then have to narrow down.

By adding the word Redgum it brings up one page with the lyrics.


So, sorry if I was offensive.

Helen