I ran into this over the weekend.

I had a question about something I took a photo of in a small village, and I knew a priest I met there would have the answer.

I went to Google to find the parish web site, and it's simply not in Google. Not at all. Lots of sorta-kinda matches in places thousands miles away, even when I specified the very unique village name, state, and ZIP Code.

So I dug through the pile of dross that comes home with me after I travel and found an old parish bulletin that had the web address printed on it. It turns out the church has a web site — a pretty nice one — but Google doesn't know about it. Or it's so heavily down-rated by Google that it didn't come up in the first seven or eight pages of results, no matter how I formed the search query.

So I went to the parish's web site to see if he has an e-mail address. The web site indicated that he is no longer the priest there. So I put his name into Google to see where he'd been moved. (I've been told by other priests that unless you're tied to a school or other institution, priests in America are shuffled around every four to six years.)

His name is fairly uncommon, so I expected Google to show me links to church bulletins or announcements about arrival or going away parties, or even church employee rosters, of which there are thousands on the web. But instead, it was page after page after page of SEO spam for "Complete phone number for $priest_name!" "Is $priest_name cheating on you? Find out!" "$priest_name in your city want to meet you!" The few I clicked through just in case had none of the promised information.

I gave up on Google, and phoned the parish office when it opened this morning. He retired six months ago. Here's his phone number.

Time wasted with the company that promised to take all of the world's information and make it available to everyone: 20-40 minutes.

Time spent getting the information the old fashioned way: 2 minutes.

Thanks for nothing, Google.