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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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.