"What's the name of the party that Ross Perot established?" a user wanted to know.

Ms. Tuckerman checked the Internet for a biography of Mr. Perot. Then she quickly switched to an electronic database of biographies to which the library subscribes. But even after scrolling through several screens of text, she was unable to come up with a satisfactory answer.

So she turned to a rotating bookshelf next to her desk and selected a volume of the World Book Encyclopedia. "Sometimes the old-fashioned sources work the best," she said. Within a few minutes she found the answer in the encyclopedia: the Reform Party. [NYTimes via Scripting News]

Type in Google: ross perot party. Answer within a few seconds. Old-fashioned sources only work the best when you use old-fashioned search queries.