The fact remains that any question gets some kind of immediate answer on Straight Dope. This is not true of any other site that I know of. If you look anywhere else, you get a long list of a trillion websites trying to sell you something. If you look up xenon, you get discos named Xenon, soft drink companies named Xenon or something like it, and so forth. If you look up Emily Dickinson you get all 180 billion persons and companies with any Emily at all in their name. After that you get every person and company named Dickinson, Dick, or Son. The very badly named “search engines” like Google are evidently merely machines operating on something called Boolean algebra. (It would probably give the same kind of mostly zany results if it used The Pythagorean Theorem).
It is clear that the web is NOT NOT NOT NOT NOT intended to answer questions from the 1% of the population that has any curiosity about anything so-called trivial or intellectual. It is for business. Show me a search engine or netscape screen that has on it SCIENCE. Some have SCIENCE NEWS at the most. And there is no ART, just “Arts and Entertainment,” which turns out to be the latest popular movie promos. The other subjects are TRAVEL, BUSINESS, THE ECONOMY, and other completely boring topics. This shows whom search engines are intended for: PRACTICAL-MINDED PEOPLE, not imaginative people. Practical-minded people who aspire to riches and entertainment. Whoops I forgot REAL ESTATE as a popular topic.
So no wonder that curious people in desperation turn to Straight Dope
Great set of resources, Alpha. Now we need a way to make them regularly available from the site, not just on a thread which will eventually drift off the front pages (unless we all keep bumping this continually.) <nudge nudge>.
May I offer:
Science/Medical:
Animal Diversity Web
Go Ask Alice (Medical Information and Advice))
Entertainment/Sports:
The Baseball Archive
Big Cartoon Database
Here’s another great one. This page provides links to hundreds of government entities.
http://www.govspot.com/
don willard, did you even try either of those searches you mentioned? On AltaVista, when I enter the search string
+“Emily Dickenson” +poet
I get prefectly good results. The first few hits are just general poetry pages, but the fifth is a biography from an encyclopaedia. If you’re looking for something more specific about her, then you can put that in the search, too.
For xenon, when I enter
+xenon +chemistry +element
I get another fine page of results, with nary a mention of soft drinks or discos.
Perhaps you could just use a bit of practice in using search engines effectively?
This is a little tricky. To expand on Chronos’ reply to don willard the use of Boolean operators makes searching much quicker and better. In Chronos’ example enclosing terms in quotes and using ‘+’ to force a term to appear in a document and ‘-’ to exclude a word will rapidly narrow search results on something like http://www.altavista.com . Clicking on links for “search tips” when at a search engine can help a fair bit. In my experience a combination of google and altavista usually gets the job done in a couple of minutes. Though unlike Chronos’ “prefectly good results” I have to confess my results rarely have any petty authority.
However I don’t think this should mean that GQ should consist only of questions for which a skilled search has turned up nothing. In this current thread THE PURPLE GANG? the OP QUASIMODEM (damn his overuse of capitals) says
For me almost all of the charm of reading and posting in GQ involves being made aware of questions. In the case of that thread I thought I knew what “purple gang” was but I was mistaken. Had the question not been posted I would not have discovered my ignorance. So to a degree my reticence in starting threads has probably deprived other posters of stuff they would love to know about but hadn’t occurred to them.
So whilst people shouldn’t use GQ as a substitute for a search engine on every little matter that occurs to them, please don’t go overboard and exhaustively search on something you think is really interesting or that has been bugging you for ages before drawing other Dopers’ attention to the matter. (and yes this is pretty much what I thought manhattan said at the top of this thread)
I pretty much agree. I just think that anything that can be answered by a quick search through obvious channels is unnecessary.
I’m not suggesing that a minimum of 24 hours of hardcore research be implemented before posting a question or anything. Just don’t ask “What ever happened to Sir Mix-A-Lot” in GQ when you can find the answer by searching an obvious place: a website dedicated to musicians.
I’ve barely posted since I read this OP a few days ago. While I totally agree with Manhatten that it’s becoming an exponential growth issue, I must strongly side with those here who admire- and wish to defend- the somewhat NON-Linear way the board works.
How many times have you read a thread, and decided not to hi-jack but instead to open a new thread on a query that came up in your mind as you read? Intellectual discourse AND some laughs seems to be the draw here. It sure is for me.
Asking members to show restraint is certainly understandable; I can’t imagine the stress of administering all of these threads. However, you can’t have it both ways. If you want people to stop the “Me, too” posts, then you run the risk of perhaps not having the best answer to an OP arise from the flurry of postings. Only the O.Poster will know if someone’s “me, too” posting might indeed hold an answer that is best. So many of the threads are imprecise. Sure, discretion is needed. But, that winds up silencing posters who are afraid that their posting isn’t supportive enough, or that it’s irrelevant. Or, just not factual. It isn’t always supposed to be brilliantly factual.
Want a cite? Here ya go: “More Of The Straight Dope”, 1988, Ballantine Books, by Cecil Adams. Page 195: Question- ‘I think my roomate is having sex with his cats. Could you explain the biological reasons why cats can’t be impregnated by human beings?’. The answer provided by Cecil was as follows-this is the full answer: ’ For the same reason you can’t park a Caddilac in a closet, you bozo’. Now, I for one had tears in my eyes when I read this, I was laughing so hard. ( A frequent occurrance during my initial reads through the books. 
) It is the very essence of our Board, shown in one sentence. Sometimes it’s NOT about the perfect factual answer, and sometimes it IS completely amusing.
Yeah, one could partition out the topics. <Yawn> Then it’s no longer the Straight Dope. And, I’ve read the first four published books of The Straight Dope, and let me tell you, if you want a guideline as to what kind of question Cecil would answer, read them all cover to cover. The wiseacre responses to the outlandish and NOT FACTUALLY BASED queries are the very backbone of the allure here.
If all we wanted was dry facts, we’d all just hie ourselves down to http://www.Brittanica.com. I mean no insult to the two moderators who are battling the avalanche, but perhaps another Mod is the way to go. Otherwise…it could possibly become what it has never, EVER been. Factually Boring. :mad:
In respect, I remain yours,
Cartooniverse
Why don’t you add an icon next to the five at the top right
(ie profile-register-members-faq-search-home) with the label “net resources” (or whatever) and put up alphagenes list and any others resource links you think might be useful.
I just want to thank AlphaGene, Colibri (spelled it right?), UncleBeer and Chronos for the oodles of new references. Cool. Thank you also Picmr for the search tips.
What a totally cool idea. I wonder if the Chicago Reader would be allowed to formally post those links? Manny? God, that would be excellent. That way, other Members could quickly make use of one member’s browsing and researching, perhaps eliminating some extended threads. ^5 Astro…
Cartooniverse
…with a helpful set of links.
Improving the research capacities of our posters has to be a good thing.
Many libraries contain a wide variety of links. Possible example: http://lii.org/
A tutorial for finding information on the web (lengthy but worth the effort) is at http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/TeachingLib/Guides/Internet/FindInfo.html
Stat sites:
Federal Government Central Directory:
http://www.fedstats.gov/ (The private sector version above may be better, I’m not sure.)
Statistical Abstract of the US (essentially, the Federal Govt’s Almanac):
http://www.census.gov/statab/www/
Page 4. Tsk. <bump>
How about a “Pay Attention To Me” forum for sympathy/I’m so cool/I need to get laid/flirting/DopeFest threads? Seems like that would skim some of the fat out of MSPSIMS, anyway.
IMHO, the most appropriate parts of this thread should be included in the GQ message board as an announcement, as many have suggested. I, like some others, have started and participated in thread about technical questions, but now I think that maybe (as Anthracite joked), tech questions (whether about cars, computers, etc.) should have their own forum. The straight dopers are an inquisitive bunch, which usually means a knowledgeable bunch, and it’d be nice to seek their expertise without clogging GQ and starting inappropriate thread in other forums.
I particularly like Alphagene’s reference page. Maybe, by educating and redirecting potential General Qustions, we can lower the rate of inappropriate threads.
FWIW, I posted a question about cats to MPSIMS that I didn’t think was GQ material, and I received all sorts of valuable responses.
Jeez, I wrote “appropriate” about five time during this post, but maybe that’s the point: propriety. Of course, I’m a newbie; what do I know?
(bump)
Ok, I’ll try plus signs from now on but when do I use the quotation marks? Also, I don’t think anybody has mentioned that when you access an encyclopedia article or some other authoritative source, you don’t get as close to your specific question being answered as you do from Straight Dope answerers. Some of these are and some aren’t the ultimate authorities, but chances are you’ll find somebody who can answer the question with interest, speculation, and often, accuracy. Also with several answering, you get a discourse on the question and on the answers. They are especially good at answering mathematics and science questions. Specific question-answering sites for these subjects are either out of business because they were too good or designed for children only. Or are only for scientists gesturing their cyclotron results at each other.
Quotation marks are for when you want those words to be right next to each other in the page. Using the earlier example, searching for +Emily +Dickenson would return pages that have the word Emily somewhere, and also have the word Dickenson somewhere. This might be the poet Emily Dickenson, but it might also be talking about some guy named John Dickenson and his cousin, Emily Smith. If you put “Emily Dickenson” in quotes, then you’ll only get websites with those words right next to each other forming the full name Emily Dickenson, which is almost guaranteed to be the poet.
Note that this is just for Altavista, the one I use most often. Other search engines might not support these features, or support them in different ways.
…or, even better, “Emily Dickinson” 
I like to throw a few subject specific and context words into a web search. It narrows down the search enormously.
to keep up with the Emily Dickinson example, search for +Emily +Dickinson +poet (AltaVista) or Emily Dickinson poet (Google)
Google automatically ‘ands’ everything you type into the search box, which helps a great deal in itself.
Thank you once again, Alphagene. I’ve added several of those links to my Favourites. The searchable Complete Works of Shakespeare is a boon, and it’s going on my workplace intranet Helpful Links page (which no one EVER seems to use, they still insist on sending group emails with ridiculous general questions. Grrr…) along with the others.
Bump
Bump.
Especially important is the part about searching on “Any date” in the SDMB archives.