In the midst of writing up the thesis and with the approaching deadline I find myself more and more neurotic about what I’m doing. I’m questioning whether I know what I’m doing and turn to Web search engines for guidance, because we all know that they know everything, even where you have left your car keys when you can’t find them.

First I turned to Google to find more about webometrics, and to my big surprise I’ve got it completely wrong. I thought webometrics started in late 1990′s with a paper written by Almind and Ingwersen (Almind, T.C. & Ingwersen, P. (1997). Informetric analyses on the World Wide Web: methodological approaches to “webometrics”. Journal of Documentation, vol. 53, no. 4, pp. 404-426.). But boy did I get it wrong. It was a lucky fluke that I checked with Google and can correct this error in my thesis now. Apparently webometrics have been around since 1526.

Now that I got the correct date I turned to the new search engine that has an answer for everything, Wolfram Alpha. I asked Wolfram: “What is webometrics?” and after a few microseconds I got an answer:

“Wolfram|Alpha isn’t sure what to do with your input.”

My thoughts exactly. And what a relief, because if Wolfram doesn’t know what webometrics is, then I don’t need to know it either. Phew, I’m glad I turned to search engines for help. Now I can happily continue writing my thesis and write about all these new things I’ve learned about webometrics.