After a busy week of reporting, I'm heading down to the coastal city of Aqaba this weekend, and was planning on flying there from Amman until a friend told me it would be almost as fast to drive.

This surprised me, and I wanted to get a feeling for the distance / time involved. And hence The Great Amman-Aqaba Search Engine Battle begins.

When asked "distance from Amman to Aqaba," Google sends me to Wikianswers, which tells me it is 375 kilometres. The second link is another Wikianswers page telling me that it is a 4.5 hour drive. Third link was useless, fourth link was very useful, fifth link was the (fairly useless) Aqaba entry on Wikipedia.

Wolfram Alpha comes right out and tells me that it is 282 kilometres. It then gets pretty useless, pretty fast, telling me that an airplane travelling at 500 mph would get there in 19.2 minutes, a soundwave would take just 13.2 minutes, and a wave of light just 982 microseconds. Thank you, Wolfram Alpha - I'll go book a ticket on the hyperdrive lightspeed express flight, ASAP.

Microsoft's Bing loses this one pretty hard. It's first link is a Wikitravel page on Petra, which is neither Amman nor Aqaba - and it doesn't mention the distance between the two. The second link is the Aqaba wikipedia page, which does not tell me the distance from Aqaba to Amman. The fourth link is the best one, and should be the first link by any rational standard.

Anyway, none of this does anything to change my mind from the fact that Google remains the standard, Wolfram is an interesting quirk for nerds, and Bing is good, but not good enough to make me change my search habits.