Re: Pi Day Exercise

Dr J R Stockton <jrs@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
In rec.arts.sf.science message <1205798948.260289@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
Mon, 17 Mar 2008 19:09:08, Michael Ash <mike@xxxxxxxxxxx> posted:
Dr J R Stockton <jrs@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
In rec.arts.sf.science message <1205718136.64961@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
Sun, 16 Mar 2008 20:42:16, Michael Ash <mike@xxxxxxxxxxx> posted:

I pasted the single character pi, from Character Map (U+03C0 : Greek
Small Letter Pi) into the MS IE 6 Address Bar, and got 3750000 results.

Typing "pi" requires two button presses. I'd wager that your sequence
requires several times more than that.

No button presses; all done by mouse. Easy if one has a pi handy.

What kind of button do you have on your mouse which doesn't require you to
press it?

Because you wrote "typing", I was considering you to be referring to key
presses; mouse buttons are much easier to use because, once the hand is
on the mouse, aiming at the button is trivial.

I used the word because it was what I was doing, not the general focus.
It's true that aiming the finger is much easier with the mouse, but unless
you also aim the *mouse* it's not going to be very useful. The important
factor here (well, ignoring the fact that this entire conversation is
ridiculously un-important) is time or effort. In general, a mouse click is
roughly on par with a keystroke in those categories, and often much worse.

On my machine, the two are equivalent. I'm on a Mac, and I can type the
letter "pi" using option-p, which is two keystrokes. I can also go through
the character palette and spend a lot more time searching for it that way
too.

Such arguments apart, it *is* worth noting that useful input to search
engines is not limited to the ASCII character set, nor to languages that
one can read.

It is indeed. The web overall has taken great strides over the past couple
of years to become friendly to non-ASCII text, although I still encounter
sites which eat my accents or asian characters with alarming frequency.

--
Michael Ash
Rogue Amoeba Software
.

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