The kindergarten continues, with my first multimedia practical being an exercise in searching the web. Unfortunately Google seems to be broken in one very particular respect, which just happens to be needed to complete the assignment. The question reads:
Find websites for the following:
An irish[sic] site that links to Microsoft.com
The most obvious search is link:microsoft.com with the radio button for search pages in Ireland checked. This fails to find Irish pages; it returns the same results as with the entire Web button selected. I tried link:microsoft.com site:ie. This gives sites in the top level domain ie, which is a reasonable approximation to Irish sites. No dice. It finds examples of the text "link microsoft.com" in Irish sites, rather than links to that domain.
At this stage I was running out of ideas so I settled for microsoft.ie which has a soft redirect to the main site so is technically correct but a bit of a cheat. It’s not quite the cheat it would have been if I simply gave the URL for this post as my answer. If anyone has any other suggestions I’d like to hear them.