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Larry Page and Sergey Brin were clearly bright fellows, but their spelling left something to be desired. In 1996, as PhD students at California’s esteemed Stanford University, they created an internet search engine called BackRub.
Later, the two boffins changed the name to reflect the amount of information their creation w
as designed to handle: ten duotrigintillion. That’s represented by the digit 1 followed by one hundred zeros. It’s otherwise known as a googol…
That misspelled electronic tool is now the planet’s most visited website (according to the Amazon subsidiary Alexa) and its most powerful brand (says BrandZ, a brand equity database).
It handles one billion search requests every day. If you enter the term HMRC into the .co.uk version, you will be given almost 1.2 million results – which is roughly ten times the number of pages on the Revenue’s website.
Google is the internet equivalent of the US military’s GBU-43/B MOAB: 21,000 pounds of guided ordinance that delivers a blast that looks and feels like a nuclear explosion. Both are awesome but not the most precise methods by which to get a job done.
Sometimes a knife is the best weapon – and sometimes a specialist or rarefied search engine is the best web tool. As was highlighted a couple of weeks ago in Blunted pin, cutting through the taxman’s site can be a drag, particularly when on the hunt for old stuff. Happily, a blade is at hand.
Further to Anne Redston’s recent uncovering of EuropArchive.org, Taxation’s editor, Mike Truman, was delighted to make a discovery of his own.
‘I’d been talking to share valuation specialists, who were annoyed at the rewriting of the Share Valuation Manual, since it has removed all the useful bits,’ he explained.
On to the web went our boss and – lo and behold! – he found the manual’s 2007 version. All the links are active, and they click through to the correct archived material.
You’ll see in the full URL of the page that there’s a section that reads ‘svmanual’. Change this to ‘ihtmanual’ and you’ll be in the annals of the Inheritance Tax Manual.
Type in ‘bimanual’ or ‘cgmanual’ and you’ll get… well, nothing. Hey, these things ain’t 100% reliable – as is also proved by the Wayback Machine at Archive.org (of which Taxation was reminded by Mark Lee of Tax Advice Network).
Type in the Revenue’s web address, www.HMRC.gov.uk, and you’ll be offered lists of pages, organised by year, from 2005 onwards. It’s far from perfect – not all links work and not all material is useful – but there are plenty of gems in there and, if nothing else, it provides an interesting look back at the department’s formative years online.
There are plenty of curios (and busted links) in the results of a search on WebArchive.org.uk. Type ‘HMRC’ into the little box, select the ‘Full text’ option, hit the button and watch pages burst forth.
There’s aged info from and about the Revenue. Much of the department’s own stuff appears to be PDFs of reports, survey results, guidance and what have you.
Finally this week, I present to you 20Search.com. It’s a site that allows you to search a term in a score of engines simultaneously (sort of). This can generate results even more overwhelming than Google on its own – but if you have the patience and, more importantly, the time to trawl through what pops up, it might well prove useful.
If any readers have suggestions for different (and better) search tools, please share them with Taxation. You can also email me with any kind of query or idea that relates to taxes online. I look forward to hearing from you.
