Google's great. Knowing how to use it cleverly is even better.

Ever been sitting down before, and a movie quote comes into your head?  You have no idea who said it, in what movie, or even exactly what they said, but it burns in your head hotter than a sunburn in the Sahara.

This happened to me, but a few moments ago.  I was sitting, minding my own business, when the whiff of this quote would rock my next 15 minutes to the ground.  "So am I ________?  Yeah, I'm (a little? a bit?)  ________"

I think the blanks may have been filled by upset, and I gave up doing this in my own head after 5 minutes, so I turned to my buddy google.  Typed (in quotes) "So am I upset?  Yeah, I'm a bit upset."  Perhaps the "bit" was off too, adding to my searching anxieties.

Nothing.  I concluded that upset wasn't the word I was going for here.  So I tried omitting it: "So am I ? Yeah, I'm a bit".  But that wouldn't work because there's a word missing entirely from the quote!  I take away the quotes, and the most distinctive keyword I've entered is "bit", which I wasn't even sure was right in the first place.  Effectively, this problem made a needle in the haystack look like a god damn lap in a bathtub compared to how hard it would be to search through the some 396 million hits which might not even contain what I was looking for.

Here I am, just an innocent man trying to mind his own business, but this movie quote won't leave me alone and I don't have the means to track it down!  I couldn't let this one go.  I remembered some basic command line searching strategies.

When tracking down a file, and you don't know how it ends, one uses the asterisk.  So, if you've forgotten "Malkovich" from the title "Being John Malkovich", and you're looking to find it on your computer, you don't have to worry.  Just search for "Being John *"

Furthermore, there's a bookending feature too.  Let's say you forget some words from the movie title "Don't be a Menace in South Central While Drinking Your Juice in the Hood".  Hard to forget, I know, but just for the sake of argument, you forget exactly what you shouldn't be doing, and where you shouldn't be doing it in the title of this film.  Simple!  Just search "Don't be a Menace * in the Hood".  Should come right up.

Now I think you see where I went with this.  I thought it would be brilliant if google offered the same tactical advantages to searching (which was a likely thought, since google tends to like things that make searching easier).  I searched "So am I *? Yeah, I'm a *"

First hit.  I am Sam.  The prosecuting lawyer, on his sensitivity towards the subject matter: "So am I sensitive?  Yeah, I'm a little sensitive".

The I figured it out satisfaction was only multiplied by how much tactics I put into finding the answer.

So am I good at google querying?  Yeah, I'm a little good at google querying.