Now and then the text messages in my phone displays a little symbol on the left of a section of speech. It looks a bit like a car battery with a plus sign on one edge. I have no idea what it means nor whether it has any bearing on the text I have sent. Was it received? Was it read? Did it go to a parallel universe?

Searching for what these symbols are should be fairly straight forward. But I spent at least half and hour in fruitless googling, ploughing through some of the least interesting prose on the planet. I am grateful that someone seems to have made an effort, though not on my behalf nor with my purposes in mind. I could find a great many tedious examples of symbols that might be displayed for any manner of purposes, even when sending or receiving text messages, but my little car battery was not amongst them.

When a detail such as this becomes a problem for so-called smart AI search engines, then you know we have a problem.