Don't you sometimes wonder how many search results you might get from the internet search engines if you looked for articles starting with the line: "Search engines return xx,xxx hits when searching for xyz"? In other words: have you ever gone ballistic over this pat intro?

The attempt to numerically grasp a topic is quite common within social sciences. It is perceived as a kind of Zeitgeist-Meta-Analysis of what-society-is-all-about. Currently you are very likely to find an article about the rise in articles in psychological publications about 'adult education' over the last 50 years, because that seems to be a topic of today. The Zeitgeist-Meta-Analysis helpfully points that out - and subsequently justifies the further research and production of text in that particular field.

But the "Search engines return..." articles are not quite the same. They don't give any insight into the increase or decrease of pages related to xyz, instead they only reveal the author's obvious starting point when researching for an article: the internet. Fair enough, but why would I need to know? Why not write about the size of the library? The number of pages? The length of bookshelves? Quite frankly, I am not in the slightest bit interested if the internet contains five, six or seven digit numbers for a search word. Such predictable beginnings always remind me of the academic's staple introduction of their papers at symposia: "You know, when I was reading through my presentation on the flight over here, this kid came up to me and...".

Anecdotes. And guess what: while typing this I asked this woman opposite me if she had anything to add about the cartographies of search engines. And she hit me 10536 times!

Janko Vook [janko.vook@art-bag.net]