You Chrome folks need extensions to use non-Google search engines?
Firefox uses just bog standard OpenSearch definitions. No shenanigans. Ships with both Google and Bing if you're into that sort of things. And you can add arbitrary search URLs, no probalo.
Well aren't the requests to backend by definition slow? Actually TCP protocol is pretty much turtle as opposed to UDP's hare: slow, but it gets you there.
Edut: was drunk here, was very spitballin' too
For data gathering? Pretty much anything that doesn't fiddle with the values. Usually, bespoke apps or applications specifically designed for survey data. People actually use spreadsheet programs a lot, but those who do spend a lot of time on ensuring data gets entered correctly.
Clearly, the superiour mode is to just use keyword based scoping (à la Ruby do ... end). When I was a kid I read an OBSCENE MAGAZINE where I saw a Forth program go dup dup dup and I was like "ok so what's the problem here? Things happen and everything is just keywords?" and my young mind was corrupted forever I guess
When I was taking my introductory courses in computer science over 20 years ago, they told me to not use Excel if you can avoid it, because it's not very, you know, precise. So I'm well aware that this is an ancient joke. Excel will fuck your data up - AI is just another way to do it.
But it is a potential scifi plot point.
However, I will concede that it's probably not a scifi plot point for too long. Worse things have already happened.
Uh huh. Interesting
(furious scribbling in the scifi worldbuilding notes) "In 2050, the names of the months got inadvertently legally changed when a megacorporation released a new version of their office suite and silently corrupted thousands of government document drafts."
NOP is $EA, of course, and... um...
...sorry, I'm just a Commodore 64 scrub, I don't know nothing about this high and mighty Intel 8086 nonsense.
[looking up]
...it's 0x90 on IA-32? WHAT? Someone told me every processor used 0xEA because that was commonly agreed and readily apparent. ...guess I was wrong
You've not understood to Existence until you've gone "oh good. foo-ood."
Source: Been a student, subsidised, unsubsidised, employed also, then left alone too. Unemployed, Also an intern, and not as much.
Foo-ooood is goo-ood. Just grab it. If you can. Tacos are better than death.
In Wikimedia projects (and MediaWiki systems in general) you actually have to pay attention to other people's usernames (when working with histories and in article discussions), and at least in Wikipedia long long time ago there was a lot of trolling/vandalism where people impersonated other users (particularly the admins) and made bunch of sockpuppets with tiny variations in names when they got banned. So this rule makes sense.
I was like, ooh, I didn't know there were newer Nikon tilt-shift lenses (Nikkor PC-E) for the F mount that are still available for purchase new... ...and the bloody things cost like 1900€. Even the older PC-Nikkor lenses cost a pretty penny in second hand market.
These lenses are firmly in "would be extremely neat to have, but are both on the very expensive side and also I don't know how much use I'd get from them in practice" category of photography gear. ...which doesn't narrow much down if we're talking photography gear, but hey.
A lot of e-companies, particularly the search engines, around the turn of the millennium, went completely crazy over the "portal" business. Everyone wanted you to make them your home page. News feeds, generous 15 megabytes of email space, web search index last updated 1.5 geological megacycles ago - "well, you see, the web sure is growing rapidly, dunno if anyone can do anything about that in the future, we sure can't". Oh and ads. Lots of ads.
So in that light, Google kind of stood out. Actually updated search index, relevant results, no-nonsense user interface.