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Of Candied Herbs and Happy Babies: Seeking and Searching on Your Own Terms

A friend asked me to buy some candied herbs for her while I was in Italy. I had never heard of such a thing. It sounded dubious-and entirely likely, therefore, to be some foreign delicacy that I would in fact turn out to adore. And that was the case. But before getting there, I needed to find out where to buy said “candied herbs.” My friend had thoughtfully sent me a link to a shop where they were apparently available. But while the shop was easy to find, every time I went, it was closed, windows shuttered.

So I figured I would try to find another source. What better way to do that than to search the Internet? The world is, after all, at my fingertips via a query in a box. “Candied herbs buy torino” yielded no results, at least none I could make sense of. So I translated “candied herbs” into Italian: canditi erbe. I typed this into a search box and got back many (many) pages in Italian, a language I don’t speak or read. I translated said pages. No luck. I tried Yahoo! Answers and found recipes for candied everything-you-can-imagine (and something I’d have preferred not to have imagined). But, as to where I could buy them in Torino? Still no luck.

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Posted by Elizabeth Churchill on November 19th, 2008 at 2:06 pm:

Related to this article on search where I mention some specialist search sites that are doing smart things, here is another one: http://www.modista.com/ - link sent to me by Andrea Wiggins (Thanks, Andrea!). Nise site. Such a simple and creative idea.

 

* More about this article

Happy Baby
By Richard Anderson on October 25th, 2008.


What is that reference to "happy babies" in the title of Elizabeth's column? She mentions it briefly in the article. Here is more, in Elizabeth's own words:

===

In the world of physical movement, I was trying to describe a particularly fabulous pose over the phone to my friend, who recently discovered yoga.

"What is it called?" she said. Damned if I know, I thought. I assumed it was some unlikely animal name, but knowing it wasn’t cat or dog or python, much less zebra pose, I was at a loss.

"Find a picture for me," she said. Hmmm.

"Can’t, not logged on."

"Well describe it to me, and I’ll find it."

"Err, okay…… you’re lying on your back and your legs are in the air, and your knees are bent and you are grabbing your feet from the outside and pulling your legs apart. You look kind of like a roast chicken." On the other end of the line, in front of her computer, she continued perusing a website with images of yoga poses. She described back at me what she saw. This went on for some time.

Eventually, I hung up, phoned a yoga teacher I know, described the pose to her, and learned in seconds flat that the name of the pose is "Happy Baby."

===

Indeed, there is ample room for improvement in the world of online search.

 


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