Richard P. Stanley's How the Upper Bound Conjecture was proved ends with two morals:
The shortest path may not be the best.
Even if you don’t arrive at your destination, the journey can still be
worthwhile.
Just a brief comment about this answer - since I see the edit summary "Removed patronizing image telling people to use Google." in the revision history and this is probably my fault.
As you can see in the older revision there used to be a text:
It was the first search result for the phrase how the conjecture was, but that search also returns other promising examples.
I was wondering where actually the OP used this search since I have tried a few possibilities: Google (both individual words and exact phrase), Google Scholar, Google Books (again both possibilities).
So I asked in a comments:
> The sentence about the search which "returns other promising examples" sounds like a recommendation for a place where to look for some similar papers. However, it is not clear what you used to search. Did you mean search in Google Scholar?
> (I have tried also exact phrase, I have tried Google and Google Books. Neither of the searches returned - for me - this paper as the first result, in Google Scholar it was at least on the first page.)
Bjørn Kjos-Hanssen then replied that he simply put the words in Google and looked at the automatic suggestions.
I replied with this comment:
> That sounds like a reasonable suggestion (which I should have think of) - here is a screenshot: i.stack.imgur.com/TswcJ.png
After I saw that the answer was edited to include the picture, I considered that my comments were no longer needed, so I removed both my comments.
@DavidRicherby Looking at your edit, I should probably mention that the picture is mostly my fault. For a more detailed explanation, see here. — Martin Sleziak12 secs ago
@MartinSleziak Ah. Makes sense, now. I didn't look at the edit history before removing it. — David Richerby26 secs ago
I guess it could come off as patronizing. On the other hand, crafting the right search phrase is not necessarily a trivial endeavour. People may work in ignorance for years just because they didn't know to search using the right phrase...
Yes, I understand that it might look that way - especially after removing the comments. (Where I explicitly asked what kind of search you used.)
Well, I was probably too hasty to remove my previous comments - so I'll at least leave the most recent one. (It has link to chat - so if somebody is curious they can see the whole story here.)
