Last weekend I wanted to make cornmeal puffs. They are something I've made before, and a great way to use up left-over egg whites. But I couldn't remember where the recipe was. I keep most of my favorite recipes on my "for fun" website when I've modified them, but not this one. So I checked the indexes of the recipe books I thought it was most likely to be in, but I couldn't find it.
After a short time searching through my recipe books I gave up and did a google. First I searched on "corn puffs" and got several thousand results. Then I searched on "cornmeal puffs" and got 74 results, which was getting better. So I searched on "cornmeal puffs" and "egg whites" and got 1 result!
Getting back 1 result in Google is a rare thing indeed, but it gets even more odd. The recipe that google found was a Google Books result, a scanned-in version of a book page. The recipe looked very familiar. I looked at the image of the book cover. The book looked very familiar. I have that book. I went to my bookshelf and found that book. I looked up the page I was seeing on the screen in my book, and there was my recipe! Google found the recipe in my book!
This is just too good! Has Google gone into my personal bookshelf and indexed all my recipes? Can I use it as an index to my own paper-based books? I've often wanted the ability to use an electronic search facility when reading a book - when I've forgotten who a character is and want to find where they were introduced or what city they were in.
Is this just an aberration, or will Google be indexing the rest of my life soon?
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