Dispatches, thoughts, and miscellanea from writer Jon Konrath

why web search is completely useless at this point

I wanted to look up pockets, as in the thing in your clothing where you put your phone and keys.

Searching on “pockets” brings me a page of stuff about Hot Pockets. (Granted, I’m eating Hot Pockets right now, but my computer doesn’t know that. I hope it doesn’t.)

Searching on “pocket” brings me pages of stuff on Pocket, the service where you save articles you want to read later, and then never get around to reading them. Seriously, the first three or four pages of results don’t have anything to do with garments.

Bing searching on “pocket” will give you a result on Pocket-Greenhaven, the Sacramento neighborhood, so I guess that’s a start.

Oh! DuckDuckGo does give you a result to the Wikipedia page on the first page of hits.

I originally was looking up pocket to make a Hot Pockets joke, or rather look up the origin of the word ‘pocket’ to twist into some kind of Hot Pockets reference. I couldn’t think of anything – pocket is middle English for sack, Anglo-Norman French for pokete, diminutive of pouch. There are various types of pockets: formed from a patch, camp pockets (sewn to the outside of a garment), slit pockets, etc. The beer pocket was popular before Prohibition, a pocket specifically designed to hold a bottle. Hot Pockets were invented by the Merange brothers, David and Paul, Iranian Jews from Orange County. They sold their company Chef America, Inc. to Nestle for $2.6 billion. Hot Pockets were manufactured in Englewood, Colorado. I got my Denver driver’s license in 2007 at the DMV immediately north of there. Jim Gaffigan grew up in Chesterton, Indiana, which isn’t too far from where I grew up. The Hot Pockets headquarters are in Solon, Ohio, outside of Cleveland, but they are manufactured in Mount Sterling, Kentucky. Nancy Green, who played the original Aunt Jemima, was from Mount Sterling.

Enough wikipedia for today. I already ate the Hot Pockets. I don’t have any idea of how Google ranks sites today, but this is why the days of searching on something are dead. RSS feeds. Everyone should blog. End rant.