Your "how did we do anything in the days before Google" moments

[control-z]

Originally Posted by panache45

Speaking of rental cars:

I was on the island of Martinique, and driving a manual French car (Renault or Peugot). It was very late at night, and I had reached the end of a long peninsula into the ocean. It was very remote, no one else around. I needed to turn around, and there wasn't quite enough space to turn around without going into reverse. I could not figure out how to put the car into reverse. Besides moving the gear shift into the slot, you always have to do something like push the knob down or pull it up. Nothing worked. And there was no Owner's Manual. I tried rolling the car forward and back, so I wouldn't have to go into reverse at all, but it didn't work. I even tried pushing it back, but couldn't. I thought of walking back to get help, but it would have been pretty far, and I didn't want to leave my luggage in the car. So after trying everything I could think of, I just sat there, trying to think of what to do next.

Finally I said to myself: "Look, this is a car. It's designed so that even an idiot can figure out how to run it. There has to be something really, really simple that I'm overlooking." Sure enough, there was a little collar right under the gear shift knob that you had to pull up while shifting.

Yeah, Google would have helped.

Yep my Ford Contour (Mondeo in Europe) was like that. The salesman didn't even know how to get it in reverse but we finally figured it out. The manual transmission ones were rare in the US, I had to drive 100 miles or so to purchase it.

[ioioio]

In the Pit thread Zoo Cancels Free Days, I mentioned that I'd seen an elephant with a hard on at the Houston Zoo and that it was quite impressive. Someone subsequently posted that they had Googled "elephant erection" to check on the matter.

There was a time when it would've taken some effort to find a photo of an elephant erection.

Google returns over a million results. You can quickly check out an elephant erection on YouTube, flickr, Photobucket, and various nature sites.

And, just in case it gives you ideas, Google has ads for Cialis and Viagra.

[voguevixen]

Slightly off-track: there's a great throwaway line from a recent Big Time Rush TV movie. (It's essentially Nickelodeon's ripoff/homage to the Monkees if you're not familiar.) While the actors are actually in their mid-twenties they're playing teenagers and whilst they were being chased through the streets of London by assassins (as happens when you're in a boy band) and one of them shouts "Oh thank goodness, a phonebooth!" to which the Carlos character replies "What's a phonebooth?!" I literally went: but seriously do like 16 year-olds know what a phone booth/payphone is? Only if they're Superman fans I'm guessing!

Originally Posted by Magiver

I remember going to the college library and spending hours and hours and hours researching stupid crap I could find in seconds on the internet today.

Yeah I was Skyping with this actual teenager the other day and being all Grandpa Simpson-y saying like "Man when I was your age we didn't have the internet and instead of looking stuff up on Wikipedia we had to go to the library and look things up in the actual encyclopedia." He said: "Encyclopedia?" He didn't know what that was.

[ioioio]

Originally Posted by voguevixen

. . . He said: "Encyclopedia?" He didn't know what that was.

It's the thing wikipedia was named after.

[JoelUpchurch]

I used to go to the library all the time for reference material. The Reader's Guide to Periodical Literature was one of my favorite sources and I also spent a lot of time with microfilm of the newspapers also. I still go to the library quite often, but not for reference searches. I will look up something online even when I know the answer is in a book 20 feet from my computer.

It is lucky that a lot of the skills are actually transferable to the internet.

I'm getting to the point where I'm thinking about getting a smartphone since it is annoying to not be able to get an immediate answer if I'm not sitting in a wifi hot spot.

[voguevixen]

Originally Posted by laina_f

It's the thing wikipedia was named after.

But I'm double sad because he obviously never read any Encyclopedia Brown books growing up.

[ekedolphin]

Song lyrics! And thanks to SoundHound on my mobile, I can even hum a few bars and it'll usually pull up the song.

[Hazle Weatherfield]

I have a serious question. What's the advantage of a Google search over a Yahoo search? I have used Google maybe five times in my life. What's so great about it?

[drastic_quench]

Originally Posted by Hazle Weatherfield

I have a serious question. What's the advantage of a Google search over a Yahoo search? I have used Google maybe five times in my life. What's so great about it?

Well, you'd know if you just Googled it.

[hajario]

Originally Posted by Hazle Weatherfield

I have a serious question. What's the advantage of a Google search over a Yahoo search? I have used Google maybe five times in my life. What's so great about it?

Seriously? Why don't you give it a try and then you tell us?

Obviously, it's a matter of taste. It's a very similar thing but the format and the results are a little different.

[MsWhatsit]

Originally Posted by Hazle Weatherfield

I have a serious question. What's the advantage of a Google search over a Yahoo search? I have used Google maybe five times in my life. What's so great about it?

For the record, Yahoo search is now powered by the Bing search engine, so your actual question is why Google is better than Bing. Possibly this is just semantic nitpicking, but I think a lot more people have opinions on Bing vs. Google than on Yahoo vs. Google. I'll be honest, I didn't even know until you asked this question that Yahoo even still had a usable search engine. I thought they'd switched entirely over to being a portal site a long time ago.

Here's a fairly detailed comparison from PC World about the differences between Google and Bing.

[Corcaigh]

In a similar situation to the OP, I RTFM. There I was at the petrol pump and I couldn't get the 'door' over the petrol cap to open. I tried pushing it in (thinking it would ping out), I tried prising it open. I opened the passenger door (petrol cap is on the passenger side) and looked for a button or lever.

In the end I gave up and looked in the manual, and discovered a tiny black 'trigger', on the floor near the driver door.

[Hermitian]

Life before Google.