All hail the search engine. Which other modern invention can direct you towards information on parking restrictions in Tooting, while also giving hints on how to make a battery out of 500lb of potatoes? But although incredibly useful, what you get out of them depends entirely on what you put in – indeed, research by Microsoft reveals that 50 per cent of queries go unanswered by standard web searches. Some sites might encourage you to phrase your query as a casual question to make you feel as if you’re interacting with some all-knowing guru, but you’re merely battling against some crafty algorithm, and it can be difficult to coax the results you want out of the colossal amount of information that’s contained in the index. The future, apparently, is “social-searching”, where the searching habits and general knowledge of the internet community are harnessed for everyone’s benefit.

One of Microsoft’s plans for 2006 is a site where visitors can pose their own questions and respond to others, and a number of these sites are already well-established. You can browse through such burning topics as “How many drops of water make a lake?”, or “How do I make a model boat out of balsa wood?” and if you’d like to help, you can add your contribution. The success of all these sites, however, ultimately depends on the knowledge base of the community, and their willingness to help. AskMetafilter – possibly the most successful example – has established itself as a thriving and fascinating community project, thanks to a self-policing policy which keeps questions concise and answers pertinent. Yahoo! Answers uses a point-scoring scheme to encourage useful and relevant responses – although the urge to bump up ones score can lead to ill-thought-out replies which don’t inspire much confidence in the system. Other sites appoint teams of researchers who are paid per response; Google Answers, for example, requires you to nominate an amount that you are willing to pay when you submit each question. It’s perhaps predictable that eagerness of Google’s researchers to earn $200 by “outlining Jungian personality types in stand-up comedy” is in stark contrast to their disinterest in the person who offers $2 for proof that his local café is putting laxatives in his food.

The other night I was puzzled by a couple of TV ads that featured the terms “prebiotic” and “probiotic”, so I asked a few services to enlighten me as to the difference. On Yahoo! Answers, user “wiggle118” earned herself a valuable point by posting the reply “I don’t know”; a contributor to AskMetafilter quickly started to muse instead upon the effect of low temperatures on probiotic yoghurt, while at Google Answers, the measly $5 I offered for solving the mystery still remains unclaimed. The prize goes to text-message service AQA, who told me within 20 seconds that “prebiotics are non-digestible food ingredients that can stimulate bacteria in the colon, whereas probiotics are foods that contain live bacteria”. And where did they get this information? Probably an internet search engine.