In the era before online searches and instant information, airline fares defied comprehension.  Travelers, through their travel agent, would learn universally that they, like everyone else aboard a given airplane, had overpaid.

Gone are those days!

Now if I want to fly to Phoenix, I can learn instantly that US Airways is the only carrier with non-stop service from Boston.  Instantly too can I learn what they charge for the route.

Flight 654 to Phoenix + Flight 220 to Boston: $399 plus taxes and fees

And instantly once more I can learn what one of those segments costs if I want to fly US Airways in only one direction:

Flight 654 to Phoenix.  $872 plus taxes and feex.

Blërg.

A one-way flight is more than double the price of the round trip on the same dates.

It’s a good thing we have computers.

Years ago, Google helpfully added a “search suggestions” box that recommends possible search terms as you start typing your query.  Type “Tina” and it recommends “Tina Fey.”  This is even integrated into Firefox now, so you can get the same suggestions when typing in the browser’s own search box.

This is old news, of course.  What’s new (at least to me) is the particular suggestions you get if you start to enter “I am extremely”

The first few make sense (at least for the Internet)

i am extremely tired      9,070,000 results
i am extremely depressed  4,730,000 results
i am extremely lonely       291,000 results
i am extremely jealous      324,000 results
i am extremely shy        3,650,000 results

It’s the last one that’s surprising:

i am extremely terrified of chinese people   303,000 results

That’s surprisingly specific… and surprisingly popular.

Suppose a person were interested in learning the date of the commencement exercises at Grand Canyon University.  This should be easy!  For example, Boston University’s Commencement page includes this text in enormous lettering:

Commencement 2009: Sunday, May 17, 2009 1pm Nickerson Field

Grand Canyon’s Graduation page makes no mention of the date, but it does have three prominent links for Student, Faculty, and Guest information.

Clicking “Guest” would prompt you to download a PDF file titled “Graduation at a Glance,” as seen here:

Opening the file, though, reveals the real magical wonder of this experience.  Examine, please, the document in its entirety:

The entire thing reads “Graduation — at — a Glance Coming Soon!”

Awesome.

From LensCrafters’ Frequently Asked Questions page:

Q. Can I buy glasses without a prescription in the lenses?
A. Yes, we call them plano lenses. You can get them with the same great options as prescription lenses, including hip tints and anti-reflective and scratch resistant coatings. Don’t forego a great fashion accessory just because you have good vision.

Really?  That’s asked frequently, is it?  People who want to buy $200 glasses just so they can wear glasses?

I love the online marketing I see for apartments.  Consider this ad from the first page of Boston apartment listings on Craigslist (at the time I happened to look, of course):

We haven’t seen lower prices at this luxury high-rise. Call today!
1 month free
$1,890 / month

…

Effective rent only $1911 per month after free rent special on 12 month lease.

If the regular rent is $1,890 and there’s one month free, that’s effectively $1,735, not $1,911.  That’s a difference of $176.  I feel like there’s a great chance one’s hypothetical security deposit would get lost in that mathematical shuffle pretty quickly.

We’re working on adding the real-time locations of buses to our Boston University Maps application, and I thought I remembered reading about a taxi company that had a live map of its taxis’ locations.  I Googled “live taxi locations” and got this as the first result:

Live nude web girl cams reviews.

Eh.  Close enough.

My elevator control panel includes these four “special” buttons:

• “Call Cancel”
• A graphic of a fire fighter’s helmet
• “Alarm”
• A graphic of a telephone

In an emergency, which should I use?  We can probably rule out the first, but the other three all sound like good choices.  I’d likely just press them all at once, so why bother installing three separate choices?

Surely the panel designers could tell us when each button is meant to be used individually, but unfortunately the elevator-riding public has not received training on these situations.  We know how to select our destination floor, but after that we really stop caring about elevator control panel operations.

I recently helped a colleague research a problem with a domain he’d registered.  I tried searching for it on a site that shall remain anonymous.  This is what I got:

Should someone tell the nice little hosting provider how domains work?