Yahoo! News – Google Used to Identify 1993 Victim
MOXEE, Wash. – Google, the Internet search engine, has done something that law enforcement officials and their computer tools could not: Identify a man who died in an apparent hit-and-run accident 11 years ago in this small town outside Yakima.
Detective Pat Ditter of the Washington State Patrol searched with Google for about a week before identifying the victim as David Glen Lewis, 39, who died 1,606 miles from his home in Amarillo, Texas.
Lewis’ brother, Larry, praised Ditter’s persistence.
“If he hadn’t looked at those cases, we would still be back at square one, thinking he’s alive and going to give us a call one of these days,” Larry Lewis said.
Seminars anyone?
Mostly, we see, again, how many folks haven’t yet acquired the skills which should be basic to Internet life. There’s one right-winger [up in the Dakotas] who has publicly thanked me for forcing him to acquire search engine skills — because I so often punctured his reliance on lousy [equally] right-wing commentators for information.
On the positive side, my hobby of the etymology of ethnology provoked a search, this week, for a name in the Atlantic Provinces of Canada — a new client of mine didn’t know the origins of his name and, frankly, it was outside my somewhat experienced ken. After the search, I was able to provide him with basic info on his family’s origins and a url to wander over to for further research.
He called me back, Wednesday, to let me know he’d not only had a blast learning about his antecedents, he ended up at a site that posted current-day photos of family members — and discovered his sister, back East, had gotten into the same search and uploaded a recent photo of her family! Pretty happy result from a couple of minutes with Google.