Pet peeve alert

I hate it when people do this, and don't understand how Google works. In the article, the author says "As ubiquitous as Scotch tape is on desks and in junk drawers, it also has gained a foothold in cyberspace; a Google search for "Scotch tape" turns up 925,000 hits".

What he did was just put the words Scotch tape into Google, without quotes around them. That means, go search for a page that has the words Scotch and tape anywhere on the page, but not necessarily together. The page could say "I poured me a Scotch and put on my BeeGees 8-track tape", and the search would include it in that 925,000 number.

If you want to search on the words Scotch tape together, which is what this guy really meant to do, you have to put quotes around it, like this: "Scotch tape". Then, Google will look for pages where those words appear on the page together, next to each other. Doing so returns 232,000 hits. A lot, yes, but a far cry from 925,000.