Saturday, January 27, 2007

Hotel near home

I know everyone thinks it's really funny that Nick and I work for Microsoft and Google, respectively, and assume that we must be incorporating NDAs into our wedding vows or heckling each other every day about our competing features and services. But I think we're generally pretty good about it. We'll rib each other when we have company over, since it's sort of expected, but we have enough perspective that we don't feel the need to spend our personal time promoting our employers to each other.

But today I just can't help myself, this is too good. :-)

I'm working on adding hotel recommendations to our wedding website, and I got a list of three hotels within minutes of our reception site, but I had no idea where the nearest hotels were to our home. So (of course) I went to Google Maps and searched for "hotel near home" (since, I might add, Google Maps is smart enough to know our home address, so I don't have to enter the whole address each time I search, I can just enter the keyword 'home').

Anyway. The search returns me four pages of results, but the first few listings include corporate housing, travel agencies, and a resort timeshare company; the first real hotel is the fifth result, and it's 1.5 miles away from our place, which isn't very convenient for people from out of town who might not have a car. So I complain about the results to Nick, and he suggests I ask Live Search (the Microsoft equivalent of Google). So I search for "hotel near 15667 NE 102nd Way, 98052" on Live Search.

First of all, the page takes nearly 10 seconds to load (an eternity in internet time), showing me nothing but a little circle going around and around. Then it pops up a security warning:

After I accept the security certificate, I get this message:

No results were found. Are you looking for the location of hotel near 15667 NE 102nd Way?

I wonder if I misspelled something... I compare this query to my original query... I find that they're exactly the same... I'm confused for a few minutes... but I decide Microsoft must know what they're doing, right? So I click their suggestion.

I get a map of central Poland, and this message:

The closest match for 'hotel near 15667 NE 102nd Way' is 'Hotel [Chotel], Kujawsko-Pomorskie, Poland'. If the closest match is incorrect, enter the complete address including country name and commas, and try again.

And I thought 1.5 miles was far away...!

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Do you think if we stay in Poland we will be late for the wedding?