Basic Trope: Highly improbable crime-solving search engines.
- Straight: Tropertown's police department crime database can identify the most likely suspect in any crime committed in town with only the clues the police enter.
- Exaggerated: The database can tell exactly who the killer is, their motive, and where they are right now from a single strand of hair left in the victim's teeth.
- Downplayed: The database can provide a list of known criminals whose modus operandi matches the crime, but the police will have to narrow it down from there.
- Justified: The criminal has incredibly specific physical characteristics shared by no one else in the area, so the database can identify her instantly from only a few pieces of evidence.
- Inverted: The database is never able to get details right no matter how much evidence you enter.
- Subverted: The crime database only works based upon data specifically within it and is guaranteed to fail to find people who are not already on file. Mishaps with it and null entries are a running gag as an inexperienced or Hopeless with Tech character will accidentally search for amputees in the criminal database.
- Double Subverted: ???
- Parodied: Simply by asking nicely, the database can (without any evidence whatsoever) tell Tropertown police who the killer is, why he did it, where he is now, and the winning lottery numbers next week. It is 100% correct on all counts.
- Zig Zagged: Some information is in a computer database, some information is in books, some information requires legwork and talking to contacts or that one family member with enough random trivia knowledge to enable an "Eureka!" Moment, but the detectives can find all the data they need given enough time (the outer edge of the 2-3 day timeframe your average crime show episode covers of their lives).
- Averted: ???
- Enforced: Viewers Are Morons and a Viewer-Friendly Interface spewing all the data they need to keep pace with the mystery is requested by the executives.
- Lampshaded: "That database is amazing!" "I know, right? It already knows the potential suspects!"
- Invoked: ???
- Exploited: ???
- Defied: Hylen the hacker gains assess to Tropertown's police department crime database and messes up with the code so that the database wouldn't give accurate results.
- Deconstructed: The database requires society to be very dystopian starting with Sinister Surveillance and highly invasive medical sampling. Making matters worse it is highly exploitable by hackers and can use it to ruin people's lives at a whim. And they are only the second biggest user of the functionality.
- Discussed: ???
- Conversed: ???
Look stuff up on the Omniscient Database.
