Yesterday I was trying to remember how to adjust something on my venerable Hasselblad 6×6 camera. I knew I had the manual which came with it when I bought the camera many years ago, but it lay entombed somewhere in the chaos of my study. So instead of spending ages searching for it, I looked for a copy on the Web. Even though the Hasselblad site denied all knowledge of the publication, Google found it — buried deep in the site’s archives. So I downloaded the document, located the pages I needed and solved the problem. In minutes. This is kind of simple thing was was inconceivable before the Web (and Google?).

Later… When putting the camera away later in the evening, I found the missing manual — exactly where it should be!