Monday, October 24, 2011

Searching for Fettuccine...


Husband is preparing a lesson for tomorrow.
As he trawls the internet for interesting examples for his chemistry problem, he marvels at the capabilities of the search-engine:
“ ...I type in a question... and...within seconds I have the 54th page of a particular course-book, published twenty years ago opened on my screen...”

Here is another aspect of our life we so take for granted, yet is almost totally absent when it comes to my daily work within AEC projects.
Searching for information is the biggest problem we all face while getting buildings off the ground (and off the paper) and it is not getting any easier despite of the spectacular achievements of various internet-based-search engines and us using the same in our ‘other’ lives.

Actually, the gap is getting bigger and bigger....
Husband searches millions of source documents for answers to a tricky question, I spend a day on a tender-set of drawings trying to figure out something quite simple.
He compares findings from 20 countries simultaneously within minutes, I turn over a thousand pages of reduced A3 sheets to locate a simple reference....

I’ve been a bit more successful with my blog – though not tagging anything does not help ‘getting found’ as easily as the system would allow.
...and a weird statistic: the most searched word this blog has come up in response-to: fettuccine*!


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