Symmetry: Apple and Microsoft kb and the wonders of Google Custom Search

When addressing technical OS problems, the Apple and (especially) Microsoft knowledge bases are often the best place to start.

Unfortunately Google searches for topics covered in Microsoft KB articles are often obscured by lots of ad funded pseudo-splog "tech sites". It takes some digging to find the good stuff.

That's the beauty of my favorite Google custom search engine. I simply add the URLs for those knowledge bases and Google boosts those results above the noise.

Wondrous, really. The custom search engine Searches my Google Reader feeds and 13 other sites including: support.apple.com/kb/, http://support.microsoft.com/kb/, www.sciam.com, bestyoucanbe.blogspot.com, tech.kateva.org ...

Even the Encyclopedia Britannica (since we still subscribe) gets boosted and included in our personal version of Google.

Which brings me to the title of this post. On entering the URLs I noticed a funny symmetry ...

support.apple.com/kb/
support.microsoft.com/kb/

Chance probably, but given all the ways in which Microsoft and Apple are trading innovations (admittedly more from Apple to Microsoft) this caught my fancy.