Every day, millions of people have problems with their computers and/or their internet connections. Almost all of these problems can be solved with the right knowledge, but that knowledge is spread out all over the internet or in the heads of tech-support guys, and can be incredibly difficult to find. Not least because half the time the victim doesn't even know what to look for.

I think google could alleviate a great deal of the world's suffering by amassing a giant collection of tech-support threads marked with "SOLVED" and then enabling interested private individuals or companies to tag and categorise the solutions in such a way that they'd be relatively easy for any remotely tech-savvy user to find.

I'm sure google could devise sophisticated algorithms for speeding up the categorisation process and for sorting solutions in the most appropriate ways (eg. most likely solution first). Users could just pick the type of machine, the OS, the general category of problem, maybe narrow it down a bit, note whether something has changed recently, upload list of installed and/or recently uninstalled software, etc, and then get a list of possible solutions to work through.

Professionals could do accessible writeups of the general categories of solutions. It would be fantastic!









I spent hours yesterday after some sort of silly glitch trying to first get my phone to connect to the wireless network like it used to, and then try to get my laptop to connect to the same network after it got borked for no obvious reason right after the phone was fixed. I think the root cause of both problems was some sort of spooky borking at a distance of my modem/router, but the solutions were VERY different for my phone and my laptop. I happened accross both solutions almost by accident and managed to implement them after a great deal of mucking about, but now that I know them they'll be in my toolbox forever. I can't imagine how someone less net-crazy and stubborn would have gone about solving these problems.