(Note: I looked through the old threads to see if this has been discussed before. I found this, but it’s four years old, so I figured it’s cool to bring it up again.)
I love watching WWTBAM. Even though I’m not as good at it as I am at Jeopardy, it’s fun to watch people squirm under the pressure of potential-gain-vs-loss scenarios, and to laugh at the guy who can’t answer the $100 question because it’s some colloquialism he’s never heard of.
But over the past couple years of watching, I have noted a peculiar trend that forces me to ask one question: why, oh why, oh why, when selecting who to use for “phone a friend”, do people not just call a computer geek friend who’s sitting at home staring at a pre-loaded Google? I’ve seen one person do this (at least, one person who I was certain was doing it; others may have done it but disguised it well), but more often than not, the friend either misses the question or expresses unsurety. There is absolutely no reason for this.
Long ago, I suspected that this was the case, but I figured that since nobody was doing it, there must be a good reason why not. Maybe it wouldn’t work after all. But after watching show after show where the phoned-in question was basically tailor-made for Googling, I had to find out for myself. So, over the past month or so, when Millionaire has been on, I’ve listened to it while sitting at my cable-internet-equipped computer. As Regis reads each question to the contestant, I hit ‘start’ on my faithful stopwatch, whip up a quick Google query, and hit ‘stop’ when I’ve determined the answer to my satisfaction (obviously, I pretend I don’t already know the answer if I do). If the result is under 30 seconds, I consider myself successful. To date, having done this with at least a dozen shows, I have failed on exactly three questions. All three were references to extremely nonspecific actions performed by one of four individuals, which don’t translate well to a Google search. Normally, I can even get an answer to those types of questions by searching for the four answers’ names, one at a time, in addition to the key terms of the action, but in those three cases, I failed. Still, (approximately) 95% overall accuracy ain’t bad.
Sure, maybe three years ago when the vast majority of people were on dialup and “Google” wasn’t a verb yet, the option was slightly less viable, or people just didn’t know about it. But even now, on Super Millionaire, I watch the guy in the hot seat cringe in despair as his Trivia Master buddy completely flubs a simple question about an Academy Award. So, I ask you, the folks of the SDMB, the brightest collection of people around: WHY???