Basingstoke!

I was impressed by Rick’s Baedeker of the home counties, so, thinking sideways, I googled “Basingstoke!”. Note the exclamation mark. Not a sausage about Ruddigore, my dear. Is there any way of scrolling forward by a chosen number of pages in Google?

“I can take you as far as the Basingstoke roundabout”

Basingstoke is something of a manufactured steel, glass and concrete blemish on the immediate area. Old Basing is quite pleasant, village green, old riverside pub and all.
It seems quite common in that larger area – pleasant settlements with attached cancerous growths.

I googled “Basingstoke!”. Note the exclamation mark.

Exclamation noted, but it doesn’t work. Google strips out punctuation stuff, which is pretty annoying when you want to look for something in code like “this.here[that]” and Google will obligingly look for this, here, and that to return a huge pile of irrelevant results.
Note, putting quotes around does not work, as it will then look for this here that instead of the three in any order.

Is there any way of scrolling forward by a chosen number of pages in Google?

In the URL, push &num and &start if they aren’t already there. Assuming you have specified 30 results per page…

• Page 1 – &num=30 (&start is not defined)
• Page 2 – &num=30 and &start=30
• Page 3 – &num=30 and &start=60
• Page 4 – &num=30 and &start=90
• and so on

You can play around with odd values: http://www.google.com/search?q=“this.here[that]”&num=42&newwindow=1&safe=off&start=67

Basingstoke is something of a manufactured steel, glass and concrete blemish on the immediate area.

You could be describing Bracknell. Or Slough. At least Woking has some attributes (used to be a nice library, when it had lots of books).

I wrote a story about a decade ago. Sci-fi with aliens. Basingstoke got trashed, painfully.

Actually, it is dedicated to the link announcer on… TVS? Newbie Meridian? Back in the early ‘90s they were broadcasting “War Of The Worlds”, the crappy American one where the Martians float because they didn’t have the technology or budget to make convincing tripods (so instead they made extremely unconvincing spaceships that looked like those things used in curling crossed with a 1950’s iron)… anyway, the link announcer said something like “Oh look, they’ve set it in America, because that’s where aliens always go. Alien’s would never attack somewhere like Basingstoke.”.

So any time I write a story that involves aliens, Basingstoke gets it. It’s like my own personal trope. ;-)

BTW – I should point out something that may not be immediately obvious to those not from the area:

• Basingstoke = bay-zing-stoke (not bas-ing-stoke)
• Woking = whoa-king (not wok-ing)
• Slough = who cares, don’t go! (but correctly said rhymes with “now”)

Google “come friendly bombs”. Thanks for the &name and &start information.

Google “come friendly bombs”.

(^_^)

I noticed the Google graphic – 197th anniversary of Ada Lovelace. Yikes, the first computer program is nearly two centuries old!

Yikes, the first computer program is nearly two centuries old!

… and it’s still not finished!