Thursday, January the 26th, 2006
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Much fuss has been made—and rightly so—about Google's launch of google.cn, designed to do the Chinese government's censorship work for them. Overlooked in all the kerfuffle is the launch of a far more admirable system from the search engine behemoth.
Google.dbsn is a genuinely useful tool. It automatically filters out all search results which are unrelated to Dobson, Dobson's out-of-print pamphlets, and other relevant Dobsonia. Thus, type “swarm of killer bees” into google.com, and you end up with a completely unmanageable 102,000 results. The vast majority of these will have no Dobson connection whatsoever, so what is the likelihood that any sane person would ever wish to consult them? By contrast, typing “swarm of killer bees” into google.dbsn comes up with just 183 results, every single one of them highly relevant. Some will take you directly to transcripts of original Dobson pamphlets, such as Killer Bees, Ferenc Puskas, And Tomatoes On the Vine or How I Coped With A Collapsed Lung During A Thunderstorm. Others will lead you to one of the many sites devoted to piecing together a complete biography of Dobson. You will even be able to track down references to the more recondite aspects of Dobson's killer bee preoccupations, such as the Blötzmann Compartments controversy of 1934.
As if all that weren't recommendation enough, google.dbsn comes with a delightful logo, reproduced (with permission) below.
