Does anyone remember the card catalog?

There used to be a piece of furniture that was standard in any library of more than, say, 100 books. It was large, heavy, and cumbersome, and the space it occupied could have been replaced with every book ever written by Stephen King, plus all those by Nora Roberts. The more research-minded could have stored the unabridged Oxford English Dictionary in its space, and perhaps the Encyclopedia Britannica as well. This piece of furniture was the card catalog.

I don't miss the card catalog.

What I do miss is the reverence with which the card catalog was held - reverence enough that one day in school we all trooped over to the school's library to be shown how to use that vast monstrosity of alphabetized index cards, sorted by author, title, or subject. "Pay attention," we were all told, "you'll need to know this."

As it turned out, we didn't need to know it. Or at least, not for very long. By the time we got to college there were electronic catalogs, and just around the corner was that greatest of all catalogs: the internet search engine. Need to know when the Russo-Japanese war was fought? Google it. Want to know who wrote "Leaves of Grass?" Ask Jeeves. Curious as to how the chunnel was dug? Plug it into Yahoo. The search engine bypasses the card catalog entirely, taking you directly to the information you want - if you know how to use it.

Was anyone taught how to actually use a search engine? Perhaps I was absent that day. But it seems to me that the electronic search engine can take more time to use thant he card catalog, if you don't really know what you're doing. Which is why I rejoiced when I found this little tool (rejoiced? well, I tagged it for delicious, which is pretty much the same thing, right?). As you create your search query on this overlay of Google, using any or all of several advanced options, it shows you how to create the same search directly in a standard search box. Basically, it teaches you all of the syntax and operators needed to make a quick, useful search. Halleluijah.