I like Celtic Soul's post - nice one! Like the Microsoft errors where they say "An unknown error has occured in an unknown program..."

As for the others though, clear cases of Garbage In, Garbage Out. Also known as PEBKAC - Problem Exists Between Keyboard And Chair. Or in more human terms, "Ask a stupid question, you get a stupid answer". More examples of that - well, there was a German who drove off a quayside whilst following a digital map, not the road. Seems he didn't notice that the "road" over a river on the map was actually marked as a ferry crossing! :-)

Suzie, I'm not sure which website you're using, but I went to Google, found www.keswick.org (top hit), that moved me to www.keswickplus.org, and that had a search field (which used Google) to search its site. The search field brought up 2 pages of hits, all of which related to music in Keswick on the site. I couldn't see a search field on www.keswick.org.

Amos, there's certainly problems with some user interfaces. However, you can't say "the customer is always right" - if you don't ask the question then you won't get the right answer. The same thing happens on Mudcat, or any other forum, when someone says "Please send me lyrics to interesting songs". The first thing we'd say (assuming we don't ignore the person) is "be more specific". Search engines effectively say the same thing by hitting you with a million links unrelated to what you actually wanted. However smart you or I or the search engine might be, we can't give you any meaningful results if we're not given a meaningful question. In brief, the problem isn't that humans use thousands of shades of meaning, the problem is that they DON'T, and then they blame their own failings in language on the computer!

This may be "literal" and "undifferentiating", but you at least know where you stand. The first rule of user interfaces is "be consistent" - even if the user interface is crap, anyone can learn it eventually (although the learning curve might put off new users), but a user interface which isn't consistent and doesn't always respond the same way will do nothing but piss ppl off. If a menu option is under Files one day, under View the next day, and isn't on the menus at all the day after, it's not much use. And that's what happens if you try to be "adaptive" and guess what the user wants. Sometimes you'll get it right and that's great, but like weather forecasting, it's the times where you get it wrong and the person has to waste the next hour working out what do that they'll remember. Hands up anyone who actually _likes_ the menus in Office 2K? Thought not.

It may be very intelligent to associate "Cars of the Stars" with music if there's stuff about car audio, or if the author of an article mentions that he's driving along with "The Chain" blasting away at volume. Irrelevant to the main drift of the site, but a sub-feature of it. The fact that Suzie wasn't expecting it is neither here nor there.

Graham.