h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Yesterday, the guy in the neighboring cubicle at work was killing time by watching Magellan's search engine voyeur. (http://voyeur.mckinley.com/cgi-bin/voyeur.cgi) For those who aren't familiar with the concept, it's basically a page that shows you what searches other people have made on Magellan's page within the last fifteen seconds. Mostly, you see just what you would expect to see (such as "where can I find hot sexxxy women?", or "CIA +JFK +UFO"), but every now and then there's an amusing one. ("Where'd I put my shoes?")

And then this one appeared: "How do you treat a scorpion sting?" This boggled our minds. Imagine the situation:

"Ahhh! John! I've just been stung by a scorpion! Call a doctor!"

"A _doctor_! Are you kidding? This is 1999! Who needs doctors, we've got the Internet! Let me just pull up Magellan's search engine here..."

"Hurry! My arm is swelling up... My vision is all blurry!"

"Don't worry honey, we'll have you fixed right up... hang on, the page is loading... hmmm, most of these are porn sites..."

"I... aaah... "

"... hmm, these aren't very informative, maybe I should try Yahoo..."

""


We fully expected the next entry to be: "HELP ME I'M ON FIRE!!"

--Riff

Tch. Naturally, I messed up the link. You can either take the parenthesis off yourself, or use this link instead:

http://voyeur.mckinley.com/cgi-bin/voyeur.cgi

tsk,tsk...but will that help with the scorpion sting I have juuuuuaaaggghhhhhhhh.....

There must be some kind of epidemic of scorpions hiding beneath people's monito-ouch!
Argh! What was that URL, again??

Its ok..panic over..just a little old Black Widow Better do some housework around the old comp!!

Just thought you might be interested there is a similar... er, thingy for WebCrawler (http://webcrawler.com/cgi-bin/SearchTicker) which has also yielded some interesting results. My favourites:

why do I feel like I am being watched?
"drunk chicks"
HOW CAN I GET MY PUPPY TO CALM DOWN
how do I break dance

They all sound good to me Will check them out!

Actually The SCHWA Corporation have suggested that these search terms become a new type of poetry; very much the internet version of the Haiku, and equally as incomprehensible.
And so I present my first Internet poem, entitled "Thin AND Lizzy" -

where can I find information on teaching the holocaust?
+sports +illustrated +swimsuits
piercing.gay
pet travel
how old am i?
what is the best way to ask someone out
are you always jewish
how do I know if I am pregnant?

(I swear I am not making ANY of these up.)

What a great idea! Good ol' Schwa.

I'll have to try that out later...

Hmmm. Well curiosity got the better of me, and I checked whether you are always Jewish. Apparently in most time zones, the answer is YES.

And while I'm here, I couldn't resist adding a few more...

how do i hack web sites
Why is the sky blue
how did bruce lee get those washboard abs
WHY DO I HATE DESTINY?
thighs
spicegirlsnaked.com
how can I open a home safe with unknown combination
Bedroom AND eyes, AND they AND undress AND me, AND take AND me, AND cut AND me AND to AND the AND bone

What, always? Gee, I've never been Jewish before... Am I doing something wrong?

Here's another good one, snipped from Webcrawler (and divided into verses):

+spiders +with +stingers
flabs
what the hell is going on?

medscape
how you stop bleeding
collectible plush

+limp +bizkit +- +nookie +mp3
where can I find a road map for Tennessee?
what is the best site on the net?

An extremely well randomly-generated poem indeed.

Although I just found something which scares me slightly:
when i can buy gun online?

I really hope this person misspelt "gum". And notice it's not "A gun". It's just "gun".

Erg... frightening. Hope he didn't find one...

Here's some people with interesting problems:

Why is my brother a Nazi?
what is toilet tissue?
HEADLICE


...that last one looks particularly urgent.

Hee hee.
Although I think this has to be WebCrawler search of the week:

How can i knock my brother unconcious?

I really wish sometimes that I WAS making this up. (Have you considered submitting an entry on this?)

Would you believe I came across this article while doing a search on Thin Lizzy?

I CAN believe you came across this article; what I CANNOT believe is that you were searching for Thin Lizzy in the first place. Any luck?

Only a couple of links to this thread and some mentions about tribute bands.
Not nearly as many as when I typed "HOW CAN I GET MY PUPPY TO CALM DOWN?"

Hey the Webcrawler link doesn't seem to be working properly anymore - have they shifted it or is it no longer available?


btw A AND THOUSAND AND DREAMS AND OF AND YOU was in the Magellan voyuer site. How would Magellan know who "you" was supposed to be? Maybe it's a song/book title (in which case it sounds like a bad one).

You have to take the parenthesis off the end. Same with my original posting of the Magellan one. Whoops.