Which search engine can make you a millionaire?

Dan Doody of Kent coulda been a millionaire.

With a little help from the Internet, that is.

In case you missed it, our hometown boy was a contestant on "Who Wants to be a Millionaire?" 10 days ago. The temporary secretary with a page-boy haircut and bookish air did not get very far, taking home only $1,000.

After enduring several bad jokes from Regis Philbin about his name, Doody got stumped on the question, worth $4,000: "What state's motto is `Live Free or Die'?"

A West Coast lad myself, I had no clue as to the right answer. But before the four choices - Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Virginia - had been displayed on the TV screen, I knew the correct response.

All I did was type the words, "state motto live free or die" into my favorite Internet search engine, Google.com. Blam! There was the right answer, at the top of the list: A hit pairing the slogan with New Hampshire.

Having a high-speed DSL connection helped. But Google also is blazingly fast. Bottom line: Where it took our Kent neighbor several minutes and two lifelines to guess wrong, Google delivered the goods in the wink of an eye.

Use of the Internet is not permitted on "Millionaire," of course. I think the Web should be made one of the show's lifelines - replacing the useless 50-50, for example. It would be a great way to showcase the Web, would probably get "Millionaire" a chunk of that hefty "dot-com" TV advertising, and would help promote the online version (http://www.abc.go.com/primetime/millionaire).

As an experiment, I decided to try playing the game using Google, Ask Jeeves and MSN Search. Like many search engines, all aim to read your mind as much as possible.

In most cases, you have to be a little creative when searching. Key words usually do the trick. Ask Jeeves is set up to respond to an actual typed question. But it searches mostly on key words as well.

The first question of the evening (asked of a contestant before Doody came on) had to do with what "occupation" Tom Hanks had in the movie, "The Green Mile." Google flubbed this one, giving me mainly movie-review sites. MSN search's fourth hit gave the answer (a prison guard), but Ask Jeeves was little help, forcing me to plow through a lot of Tom Hanks and movie sites.

The second question, "In January 2000 who replaced Bill Gates as CEO of Microsoft?" was one I did not need multiple choices to answer. But I played along anyway. Ask Jeeves gave the answer on its opening screen, in less than five seconds. Google could not produce the right answer, whether I typed "Bill Gates replaced" or "new CEO for Microsoft." MSN - for shame! - also choked on this one, giving me a lot of Bill Gates sites but nothing about Steve Ballmer being named CEO.

The next question, "Which band reported Ticketmaster to the Department of Justice in 1994 for monopolizing the ticketing industry?," was another gimme for a Northwest guy (why didn't Doody get a few of these?). Google shined on this one, giving me the answer in five seconds. Ask Jeeves was less helpful, giving back just one hit, a Pearl Jam fan site that took about 15 seconds to plow through for confirmation. MSN came through with its fifth hit in seven seconds.

And so it went. In nearly every case, at least one search engine spat back the right answer in a few seconds. Exceptions were the questions used to choose a contestant (they have to do with ordering four choices chronologically, something no search engine will do).

The search engines particularly shined on the stumpers. On "Besides JFK, who is the only other president buried in the Arlington National Cemetery" - a $125,000 question that sent one contestant packing - Google once again came back with the right answer (Taft) on its first hit. MSN had the answer on its fourth selection, opening page. Ask Jeeves required three screens and about 20 seconds.

Patty Hearst's nickname (by her abductors), the location of Michelangelo's David, the identity of characters in a Richard Adams' novel and the identity of the youngest president at inauguration (not JFK) all were fairly easy pickings.

What I found most interesting in the experiment was how different the search engines behaved. Each took markedly different routes to attempt the same destination. It goes to show that there still is a lot of variety - and unpredictability - in the Web search business.

User Friendly appears Sundays in the Personal Technology section of The Seattle Times. Paul Andrews is a Seattle-based writer and longtime observer of the technology industry. Send e-mail to: pand-new@seatimes.com.