Research vacuum
There's a Reuters article at forbes.com about some new search-related software. The article isn't very clear about what the software is or does (the Onfolio site does a better job of that), but I was amused at my misreading of some of the phrasing in the article:
The Cambridge, Massachusetts-based company's software acts as a research vacuum....
I suspect that by "acts as a research vacuum" the article's author meant "is analogous to a vacuum cleaner, in that it sucks in information." But my initial reading was that it acts like a vacuum of the sort nature abhors, a kind of negative information space, causing research to flow into it to fill the hole.
And then:
"Heavy Internet users are searching for and finding dozens, even hundreds of things a day," J.J. Allaire, Onfolio's chief executive and co-founder, said in an interview.
Of course he means that an individual user might search for dozens or hundreds of things a day, but I initially read that as indicating that the entire group of heavy Internet users were collectively searching for as many as hundreds of things a day.
They shouldn't let me read news.
Oh, hey, I just noticed the name attached to that second quote. "J.J. Allaire" is, of course, better known as the founder of a company named Allaire, which Macromedia bought a few years back. They were the makers of ColdFusion and HomeSite, among other things.