Search Engine Tales

author: jim.cerny@unh.edu

 updated 17-FEB-1998

Anecdotes.

These examples are selected to illustrate in narrative fashion the twists and turns of real-life searching on the Internet.

The Wizard of Oz.
Klaatu barata nikto.
Ichthyosaurs.
Mo Vaughn.

The Wizard of Oz.

One Saturday afternoon in June, 1997, I got into my car at a shopping mall and idly tuned in to the middle of an economics discussion on National Public Radio. The talk was about the changing physical nature of money, from gold and silver, to paper, to electronic funds transfer. Mildly interesting. As the interviwer was about to wrap up, the expert asked if he could add something interesting. Sure. He then went on to describe the ways in which L. Frank Baum's "Wizard of Oz" is a parable or allegory for the Populist movement in turn-of-1900 America. He explained that the Cowardly Lion represented Williams Jennings Bryan, how the yellow brick road (gold standard) led into the green land of Oz (paper money), and a number of other quick cross-references. Wow! I'd never heard that before but it was intriguing, pretty convincing.

I decided to look for more details on the Internet. And, with this class coming up in late June, it would make a cool example of using search engines. Way cooler than I expected! There was no problem finding Wizard of Oz sites and the detail I was looking for.

The Wonderful Wizard of Oz was written by Lyman Frank Baum in 1900, at the time of the collapse of the Populist movement. The Populist party of Midwestern farmers, in alliance with some urban workers, had challenged the banks, railroad and other economic interests that squeezed farmers through low prices, high freight rates and continued indebtedness. (attributed to Peter Drier, These Times, September 27, 1989, and earlier distributed by Pacific News Service, quoted at http://www.mangonet.com/~doog/kruft/oz.html).
Other pages added more details. I was ready to believe. Until I ran across Eric Gjorvaag's pages on L. Frank Baum at http://www.eskimo.com/~tiktok.faq04.html, which had information that cooled my conversion. Baum did not have an overt political agenda and never claimed that Oz was an allegory. Nobody made the connection in print until Henry Littlefield published an article in 1964 ("The Wizard of Oz: A Parable on Populism," in American Quarterly, XVI, 1964, pp. 47-58). That received no special notice until Gore Vidal mentioned the article in The New York Review of Books in 1977, giving the idea attention. Since then the idea has taken off. Well, maybe one needs to be a Baum and Oz scholar to reach a definitive conclusion.

In relating this to my co-worker, Bill Costa, a few days later, he smiled and said that there were current claims of synchronization between the sound track of the movie "The Wizard of Oz" and the group Pink Floyd's new CD "Dark Side of the Moon." This sent me back to the Internet and search engines right away. No problem finding lengthly discussions of how to play the movie while listening to the Pink Floyd soundtrack (start at the precise moment the MGM lion finishes its third and final roar). Are these bizarre coincidences or intentional? We know there is a long history of dubious claims of hidden messages in songs when played backwards -- is this the high-tech evolution of such claims? In any case, the New York Times deemed it worthy of a report (Garry Rindfuss, "Ding Dong, the Artistic Convergence Is Dead," Sunday New York Times, June 15, 1997, Week in Review Section, p. 2).

Klaatu barata nikto.

This is the famous phrase from the 1951 science fiction movie, The Day the Earth Stood Still.

A flying saucer lands in Washington DC, and a great robot and a human being emerge. The human tells Earth governments to behave, or they will be blown away. The human is duly murdered by us. The robot -- who is, shockingly, the real boss -- gives him rebirth. (John Clute, Science Fiction: The Illustrated Encyclopedia, 1995, Doring Kindersley Books, ISBN:0-7894-0185-1, p. 262.)

The robot's name is Gort and the heroine (played by Patricia Neal) saves herself from him by uttering, at the last minute, the special phrase she has been taught: "klaatu barata nikto". How do I know that this is the correct spelling? Well, that seems to be the consensus in searching the Web, even if the New York Times rendered it differently:

John Roberts laughed off the accusation that he's a 39-year-old yuppie replicant of trhe 63-year-old Mr. Rather. "I don't think they're casting by looks," said the former co-host of "Canada A.M." "I think they're casting serious, Type A, aggressive personalities." Klaatu Barada Nikto (Maureen Dowd, "Send in the Clones," Sunday New York Times, December 10, 1995, p. E13).

This phrase makes an interesting Internet search example because it is unusual and because some of its component words (barata, nikto) are real words in some European languages. In the search process I found some interesting TDTESS posters and images.

Ichthyosaurs.

My quest for ichthyosaurs started one day in May, 1996, after rummaging through one of Stephen Jay Gould's essays on ichthyosaur skeletons and morphology. (Stephen Jay Gould, Eight Little Piggies: Reflections in Natural History, 1993, W.W. Norton, ISBN:0-393-31139-2, "Bent Out of Shape," pp. 79-94.) Among the illustrations for that essay is the classic painting of an ichthyosaur by Charles R. Knight (p. 82), which I remembered from one of my childhood books (W. Maxwell Reed, The Earth for Sam: The Story of Mountains, Rivers, Dinosaurs, and Man, 1929, Harcourt Brace, fig. 118). A nice full-page illustration, but in black and white (44K), while I suppose the original is in color. Just a few hours later that day, a new issue of Scientific American arrived, featuring an article on Charles R. Knight and his art. (Gregory S. Paul, "The Art of Charles R. Knight," Scientific American, June 1996, pp. 86-93.) Nice color reproductions of some of his dinosaur work, but not the ichthyosaur.

At the same time I was preparing a short course on Internet search tools and it seemed karma to use this as an example -- something unusual enough to distinguish between the major search engines. In the end I never found a copy of Knight's ichthyosaur on the Internet. But I found a number of other examples of both ichthyosaur drawings and fossils. I also discovered that the ichthyosaur is the Nevada state fossil and that there is a brew in Nevada called Ichthyosaur Pale Ale with the slogan, "Gimmie an Ickie!"

Here are some of the findings. All are in color.

Mo Vaughn.

In the course Online Network Exploration (CS403), a major project for the course involved building a Web page. Students were given wide latitude in selecting subject matter. One student constructed an extremely impressive collection of material on Red Sox sports teams. Grades were calculated and turned in.

About two weeks later we received e-mail from an irate parent, very upset that the CS403 student had just copied material from their son's hobby Web page on Mo Vaughn. They provided the URL and we checked. Sure enough, many paragraphs plus statistical tables were copied verbatim. How was this detected at all, given the millions of Web pages on the Internet? Well the Mo Vaughn fan routinely searched the Internet for new Mo Vaughn material, using search engines. The UNH server used for the course was indexed. And the fan immediately recognized their work had been taken without credit.

Lesson 1: Don't rely on security by obscurity on the Internet. Search engines have great power to discover, index, and make retrievable otherwise obscure information.
Lesson 2: While search engines can be used to detect plagiarism or theft of written materials, it doesn't scale well (in time involved) to allow instructors to routinely check student work.