Who Am I?

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Note: If you’re looking for information about the author of this blog (Ed Pas), check the Info page.

It’s a good thing I’m living so far from Saskatoon, otherwise I’d risk being teased incessantly by relatives. Still, this story is too entertaining to not share.

The other day I got the following email from a relative:

Message Subject: Useful web tool for quick information

A very useful web search tool – rather than getting a long list of web sites that contain your key search words – this one focuses on providing an direct response to your key words search with 1 page of information, or definition, etc. – fast way to get key information from web.

Check it out – there is information on what it does and a video clip demonstration on their web site. Also it is a free download if you want to add as tool inside your search engine. http://www.answers.com/

Being an internet search junkie, I followed the link. I did a few searches, and found reasonable answers to a number of simple queries. Many of the answers referenced Wikipedia, which I prefer to search directly rather than going through a meta search site like answers.com.

In any case, my ego quickly got the better of me and I decided to find out if answers.com knew me. I wasn’t expecting much, considering I’m not mentioned anywhere on Wikipedia, let alone meriting my own entry. But I wasn’t expecting the response I got. Look closely at the suggestion:

answers.com: who is ed pas

Lia found this quite entertaining. I decided to see what the site had to say about her. I was hoping for something dramatic. Or absurd. Still, this seemed fitting:

answers.com: who is lia pas

I’m sure you can draw your own conclusions. If you want to search for yourself (pun intended), try this link. Answers.com looks useful, and if you’ve got a linguistically imprecise name, it’s good for a few laughs. Especially for fans of Hong Kong action movies. That last sentence will make more sense if you click the link.

2 thoughts on “Who Am I?”

  1. Funny you should mention Answers.com, or GRU. (old stock symbol from when it was called Gurunet)

    I know this site. I think the company is hugely overvalued, considering that they are basically an online encyclopedia without sources of their own. Wikipedia? give me a break. like you said, anyone could just look things up on their own.

    Their much-touted relationship with Google? You could put a google search-bar on your blog, sign up for Adwords, and claim the same.

    Then again, Ask Jeeves got bought out today for 1.5 Billion, and the New York Time scooped up About.com for $400 million a few weeks ago. Bubble? What bubble?

  2. Back in February, Robert Cringely mentioned an impending stock bubble due to an overabundance of unspent VC cash. An overabundance to the tune of about $25 billion. Could explain a lot.

    You may recall that I asked a year ago for venture capitalists, who weren’t at that time funding much of anything, to start spending money if only to jump-start the economy. They didn’t, of course. So why would they now start to fund every deal in sight? That’s simply because their alternative is to give back the money and then some, which they will never do.

    Here’s the full story.

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