Teach Google a Lesson!

Google is a fantastic search engine. The first thing I do in the morning is Gmail. Without Google Calendar, my life would be a mess. But sometimes, one human can do a better job than CONFIDENTIAL computers.

The PIC16F688 has been the focus of my attention for the last few months. In particular, I needed to read about its EUSART (aka UART) peripheral for a school project. Who do I ask? Google of course.

Sure enough, the second search result is the datasheet. But here's what Google didn't tell you: it's not the latest revision of the datasheet. This sucked particularly hard in my case because I had already printed a hardcopy of the relevant part of the documentation.

Luckily, Google has recently introduced a feature that lets me amend that. It's called SearchWiki and it rocks! I was tempted to also click on the "X" button to tell Google that that's the wrong answer to my query. I tried to tell Google what the right answer was by searching with my original keywords ("pic16f688"), plus some keywords that bring up the correct answer ("41203D"):

I clicked the green "Promote" icon, but alas, that result doesn't show up in the result page for just the original keywords ("pic16f688").

Nevertheless, SearchWiki lets me make sure that I never make that same mistake again. At least until Microchip releases a new revision of the datasheet... ;-)

-Cat