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Farhad Manjoo
Apr. 03, 2008 |
Of course it was an April Fools' joke.
On Monday night I launched my new start-up, I Google For You, whose function is pretty much as it sounds: People submit what they're looking for. I search the Web and mail back the single perfect result.
From the minute my post went live, the queries streamed in -- in fact, people are still submitting keywords right now.
But I've stopped answering. I quit at around dinnertime on Tuesday; before that, I'd been Googling nearly constantly.
Let's do the numbers: So far, I've received more than 1,800 requests for Googling. I've managed to answer about 400. If you submit a query now, you'll find almost 1,500 people in line ahead of you -- and the likelihood that I'll ever get to your query is pretty much nil.
There was great diversity to the queries I saw, but I did notice a few popular keywords. At least a dozen people looked up "April Fool's." I couldn't tell if they were genuinely interested in more information or were merely trying to signal that they got the joke.
Another popular query: "The Meaning of Life." I responded with the Wikipedia entry on Richard Dawkins' "The Selfish Gene."
Many people also searched for "fun," "hope" and "my car keys." My responses: Fun -- the product page for Slip n' Slide. Hope -- Mandy Moore's "Only Hope" video. Lost car keys -- KeyRinger, a device that purports to eliminate the problem.
Several customers said they were extremely satisfied with the links I found. I steered a fellow who was looking for "hard drive backup strategies" to this helpful page, which he said was exactly what he'd been looking for. Another person searched for "train a dog to poo on a particular spot," and was happy with the advice I found on that particular subject. The person who searched for "the name of that one song" was bowled over by my response: A video for Boney M's "Brown Girl in the Ring."
I have to admit some failures, though. One customer thought that the link I found for "site to buy upscale and modern baby gifts" was not upscale enough. And many people who searched for a person's name complained that I sent back a link for the wrong person (with the same name).
There were also lots of queries for which I couldn't quickly find a good result (see a partial list below).
One final note: Lots of people asked me for a job at I Google For You. I'm glad you're interested! Considering the difficulty of searching the Web and the interest many people have in helping others search, I plan to turn I Google For You into a full-fledged help-others-search site.
That description's vague, I know, but the cat will soon be out of the bag. I'm hoping to launch my new company this fall, at Michael Arrington's influential TechCrunch start-up conference.
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I talked about Googling for others on my weekly Current TV spot.
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Here are a few of the hundreds of search requests that I haven't gotten around to answering; if you've got a good link for any of these, please let me know (all sics in the original queries):
-- Farhad Manjoo
