It's amusing – or at least a time-wasting diversion – to mess around with search engines and see what comes up. Dave Gorman has based a substantial part of his career on just that.
Starting points are simply that and can take you in all sorts of unexpected directions. You may lose an hour or three in the process, but there'not much harm in expanding your mind with some light Googling. Sometimes you'll learn quite a lot; other times, uncover unexpected links.
While proofreading some copy for work I came across the term tessellating. We use some interesting terms to describe different types of keyboard, and tessellating was a new one to me. I had a vague idea of its meaning, but wanted to verify it was the right word in the right context. Into Google it went.
Imagine my surprise when the top results (aside from a po-faced Wikipedia explanation) related to knitting. A tessellating fish pattern and lively forum discussion about it had pushed the phrase high up the Google results page.Who am I to argue? Here’s the link: http://fiberphile.typepad.com/fiberphile/2006/01/a_little_bit_of.html – Expect to see a photo of a brightly coloured tessellating fish appear on my blog one day soon.
