Google: Why Bother? Redux

Once again, I have to wonder what the point of studying searching is.

Searching is a really interesting field of research, and plenty of companies, not the least of which is Google, is looking into some really interesting ways of computationally finding what you want.

Once again, I state my belief that there is no point to doing this.

Once again, I was in someone's office this week as they were describing a problem to me. File2 was misbehaving, but File1 was just fine. "OK, I want to compare these two," I say. "Where is File1?"

"Ummm. Uhhh...." I'm sitting in the user's chair, and I'm already inside this user's departmental folder on our file server. She's lost. Totally and utterly lost. Kinda remembers the file name, but doesn't know where she saw it last. And her first, second, and third ideas to find it are, in order, maybe it's in her personal folder, maybe it's in Jane's personal folder, and maybe it's in another folder she can remember.

At no point whatsoever did she think to ask me to search for it. So finally, I tire of her guessing and just ignore her wringing hands and furiously furrowed brow long enough to run a simple filename search on the root folder. It pops up in about 3 seconds.

"There it is!" she screams. "How did you do that?!"

The Earth is definitely doomed.