mortiz080

Sometimes...  ... you just want to see your search results sorted by date. How can you do this?   Turns out it's not hard, just slightly obscure.  Here's a simple way to do it...  First, do your search, then limit by time, THEN you can sort the results by date.  Here's the same example query as in the video:   Then click on "Tools" (1) in the image below.   This will popup a time-restriction set of options (2).   Select whatever time period you want (including a custom range).   Then click on the menu that says "Sorted by relevance" and it will popup two options, including "Sorted by date"  (3).  When you select that option...  . ... it will sort the results for you in reverse chronological order.     This is incredibly handy for looking at the results of site: search.  Here's a nice example:  Suppose you want to read the latest articles on "coral bleaching"  from the magazine Science News.  Here's...

Seeing a place once...  ... and then seeing it again 10 years later is often a shock, but also sometimes a revelation.  Things change, places are transformed, the new washes in--and if you look over a long enough period, you can see the planet change.   As an example, here's a place that's not far from my old work location from 2007:  Of course, this is California, so things change quickly.  This is the same place 8 years later.   And this happens at larger scales as well.  Here's San Francisco in 1938:  And SF a 21 years later:  In the course of doing my research on various SRS Challenges, I've done a lot of looking for images at time X and then the same shot a few years later.  But even after I've found them, the problem of comparing  them is always problematic.  I can sometimes put them up side-by-side, like this:  While that's handy, it's really hard to compare individual locations.  I end up using two fingers to ...

We see things all the time...   .. you often just don't notice.  This is part of the complexity of this Challenge--you see these visual effects often, but we almost never talk about them.  If that's true, HOW do you search for them?   Here's what I did to find these answers.   1.  When I went for a run a while ago, I scampered around a blind corner and smashed my forehead into a stop sign.  The impact didn't hurt much, but it dropped me flat on my back onto the sidewalk.  I got up quickly and resumed running.  Nothing was hurt, BUT this is what my visual field looked like:  There was a relatively large C-shaped fuzzy spot just to the left of my visual center.  I fell on my back, so my eyes were untouched by the accident.  The good news is that this fuzziness went away on its own after about 1 hour.  Challenge:   WHAT is this visual disruption called?  Should I worry about it?   As Remmij pointed out, this IS...

Hi folks...   I'll be back tomorrow to answer our SRS Challenge from last week.  (I forgot that I'd be speaking at a conference today, so today is full of preparations for that talk.)   It's not all work, work, work though.  The conference is on a lovely beach.  Here's a picture from this morning's run.  And here is the track of my run, as recorded by my phone's GPS tracker.   As you might recall from an earlier blog post about the errors in GPS and maps , I really don't (yet) know how to run on water.   But I'll be free to write up my thoughts tomorrow morning.  See you then!  Keep searching... 

It's graduation season.  Last month (May, 2017) I was fortunate to be asked to give the commencement address at the University of Maryland's Information School.  As you might know, I hang out there from time to time talking about information-y things, and it was a real honor to be asked to impart some wisdom to the graduating class as they head out the door to the start of their post-graduate life.   This is what I said to those students.  I thought you, my fellow SRSers, might enjoy reading this.   May 22, 2017 * U. Maryland, I-school Commencement Address   "You want to do what?"   I've been thinking a great deal about the genre of commencement speeches over the past month.  And I did what anyone from Google would do… I went to YouTube and did a search for:       [great commencement speeches]   over the past couple of years.  I then sat down to watch about 50 or so.   I recommend you never do this.   And I ...

Seeing is complicated and subtle.   Of course, it works really well most of the time.  We see colors, textures, print, cats, people, silver moonlight on the river, smiles, and that expression from your beloved.   But sometimes vision gets more complicated than we'd like.  This is our topic for this week--When you see things , what's going on (and how concerned should you be)?   These three Challenges really happened to me, so I am, naturally, very curious about what you'll discover!   1.  When I went for a run a while ago, I scampered around a blind corner and smashed my forehead into a stop sign.  The impact didn't hurt much, but it dropped me flat on my back onto the sidewalk.  I got up quickly and resumed running.  Nothing was hurt, BUT this is what my visual field looked like:  There was a relatively large C-shaped fuzzy spot just to the left of my visual center.  I fell on my back, so my eyes were untouched by the acciden...

A Public Service Announcement for librarians, reporters, and editors...   I'm giving two different talks this weekend.  If you find yourself at either event, please come up and say hi!  (It's great to meet SRS readers in the real world.)   _______________ Saturday, June 24, 2017 American Library Association  (ALA)   where:   Chicago Convention Center , McCormick Place, W180 time:  1PM – 2:30PM  title:  “ What do you need to know? Learning and Knowing in the Age of the Internet ” abstract: What does it mean to be literate at a time when you can search billions of texts in less than half a second? Although you might think that "literacy" is one of the great constants that transcends the ages, the skills of a literate person have changed substantially over time as texts and technology allow for new kinds of reading and understanding. Knowing how to read is just the beginning of it -- knowing how to frame a question, pose a query, how to in...

As you might have expected, there are many answers.    I'm not surprised, but the variety of answers (and questions) DID surprise me!   SRS readers have a wide variety of interests!  This week's Challenge is about what kinds of SearchResearch questions come up for YOU in your average week.  To restate it:  1.  What kinds of things do you find tough to research?  In an average week (however you define that),  what topics and questions do you find yourself trying to research?   Here's what I found (from the 67 different replies I got--not just from the blog, but from other surveys as well).   I broke the replies down into two groups.  Well, here's my summary of each category.   A.  Easy searches.    Things we search for all the time (but aren't especially difficult to find).   This is mostly just plain old finding stuff.  Samples include:    - word definitions    - how to somethin...