Pages from a TechMan's notebook:

Ever wonder why you can't type, "When is the earliest scheduled US Airways flight to Pittsburgh tomorrow" into Google and get an answer?

Try it. You just get a lot of news stories about Pittsburgh flights.

The reason you don't get an answer to your question has to do with what is called the Deep Web or the Dark Web.

The Deep Web is information that is contained in databases that are available on the Web but require you to log on or pose a question, also called a query, to obtain the information.

Google's "spiders," programs that follow links from Web pages to harvest information in a form that can be searched, cannot log on or pose a query. Therefore the spiders are blind to the information in these databases, and a great deal of good stuff resides there.

But that may be changing.

The New York Times recently reported that Google and others, including a project at the University of Utah called DeepPeep (www.deeppeep.org), are developing ways to find that information and expose it to search. Programs are being developed that could determine the general subject of a database, then analyze user search terms or the results of their own searches to extract meaningful information.

Back to our example. To find the earliest scheduled flight to Pittsburgh, a search engine would have to identify the airline database containing that information then pose a query about origination and destination of the flight, date and time of day, and perhaps fare.

That is not yet possible. When it is, searching the Web will become a lot richer.

TechMan gets a number of e-mails from readers asking specific questions. Some he can answer, some he can't, and some would require him to come over and sit at the computer in the living room.

Yet TechMan does want to help readers if possible, so he has taken to having an all-question program periodically on the TechTalk podcast. The podcast is posted late-day Mondays at post-gazette.com/podcast. Look for the TechTalk icon. Tomorrow's podcast will be devoted to answering as many reader questions as time permits. And TechMan's poor grasp of most subjects will be mightily buoyed by the participation of the PG's technology editor Tim Dunham and PG Webmaster Jody Farr. So if you've e-mailed a question recently, have a listen.

A followup to our news quiz of a couple of weeks ago. In that quiz I said that if you answered "Put it in the dishwasher" to the question of how you should clean your keyboard, you were wrong.

A reader who is in the IT field wrote to say that he routinely washes several kinds of keyboards in the dishwasher with no ill effects. He said he has even left the heated dry cycle on, but he wouldn't recommend it.

But, he cautioned (and I think this is the key here), you must be very sure the keyboard is completely dry inside and out before you reconnect it. This thorough drying can take a day or even more.

So although I still don't recommend this process, I have to allow the dishwasher method as a correct answer to that quiz question.

Some people will do anything to improve their grade.

First Published: March 8, 2009, 5:00 a.m.