Googlefasting: Day 5

Continued from Day 1, Day 1.5, Day 2, Day 3, Day 4…

• Needed to lookup location for tonight's Ask party. Decided to ask Ask's new Local service. Everything was all well and good until I got to the mapping page, which choked in IE7. Had to flip back to Yahoo! Maps, which also choked when I tried to enter in the club's name and its city. Apparently, it needed the specific address, too. Kinda silly, if you ask me - especially if they already have the data.
• Needed to find Gary Price's email address, but I couldn't remember his name (don't ask). Went to Yahoo, remembering he wrote a great article on Gada.be in SearchEngineWatch. Found his name, then was able to find his email through Copernic on my desktop.
• Realized the sweet irony of doing this “fast” while attending SES, the definitive search engine conference. Even so, nobody here really knows that I'm doing what I'm doing. By the time they do realize they could have told me about their alternatives to Google, I'll probably be back on the juice.
• Got hungry. Wanted to find “good italian nearby,” and IceRocket pulled up my room at the Hilton as the number one search result. Wow, that's an amazing engine you got there, Mr. Cuban. [just kidding, this experience didn't really happen]
• There is (seriously) no peer restaurant recommendation engine out there. I wanna know what my friends have to say about these local food joints - or their friends. Why can't anybody do this? Why can't they connect the dots for me? I'm still hungry, dammit - and I don't trust the conceirge at this hotel anymore.
• Got phoned by an ABC affiliate in Australia. They found out about this tale of woe via Steve. On the call, which was quite playful, I upped the ante and decided to keep fasting for another week - for a total of 14 days without using Google. I believe most of my emotional attachment has been burned away, although I'm still struggling to find a close second. You heard it here first.