mortiz080

I'm almost done!   Well... that is, the writing of the first draft is nearly complete.  Only another 2 or 3 thousand words to go.  (That sounds like a lot, but it's an afternoon's worth of writing.  The problem is that a lot of those words then get edited out in a later cycle.  Still... it's progress!) In this last week before we go back to our regularly scheduled program, I'd like for you to fill out a little survey.  It's your chance to alter the course of the book!  Have a minute?  Contribute your brilliant thoughts to this small survey.  I'll summarize what I learn in next week's post. Search on!  Loading...

Normally...  ... we'd have a SearchResearch Challenge this week.  BUT... as you know, I'm working on a book about the SearchResearch experience.  It's not about SearchResearch per se, but about what we learn here--how to frame questions and how to use our research skills to answer those questions.   Well, the update is that I'm nearing the end of Draft 1.  So, for the next 7 days, I'm working on a deadline to get everything done and turned in for first round of editing.   This has been a tremendously exciting project, and I hope you'll all recognize some of the chapters!  Our blog has been incredibly influential, and as I'm wrapping up the first round of writing, I'm constantly re-finding ideas that we've shared over the past few years--and I appreciate all of your comments.  Thanks for all the ideas and support over the past 8 years! (Yes, SRS started in May of 2010 with 1032 posts and 2.995M reads.) PowerSearchingWithGoogle.com logo--a...

This was supposed to be a fun Challenge...  ... but perhaps it was more complex than I'd thought it would be.    Let's go through each, one at a time...  1.  When in Switzerland, one naturally eats a lot of chocolate.  (I certainly did.)  But as I was munching on a bar of Lindt milk chocolate, I realized that the image on the bar of chocolate made no sense to me.   WHAT is going on with this cup?  Why is the handle so strange?   (Did Dali do this illustration for them, or what?)   If you don't know that this is called a "dipper," then it's a lot harder to figure out.  Luckily, I knew that word, and doing an Image search for:       [ milk dipper -constellation ]  pretty quickly finds similar contraptions.  Note that I added in the -constellation  to get rid of all the "Big Dipper" constellation images.   And once you see these "cups with odd handles," you'll learn that ...

I've spent a fair bit of time in Switzerland...  ... over the past couple of years.  Partly it's because I go there for work, but part of my work last year was teaching a semester-long class in Social Computing at the University of Zürich.   But as with any place where you're the new guy, there are certain mysteries  that crop.  Here are a few that came up for me.  I figured them out, but can you figure out as these little trans-cultural mysteries as well?  (Of course, if you're Swiss, you'll have a huge advantage here..)   1.  When in Switzerland, one naturally eats a lot of chocolate.  (I certainly did.)  But as I was munching on a bar of Lindt milk chocolate, I realized that the image on the bar of chocolate made no sense to me.  WHAT is going on with this cup?  Why is the handle so strange?  (Did Dali do this illustration for them, or what?)   2.  One day I walked into a bakery in central...

Symbols are SUPPOSED to be easy...    But as we found out this week, if you don't already know what a symbol means, it's sometimes difficult to figure it out.    For instance, this symbol means  biohazard .     And this one is easy to search for:  A search-by-image of the above symbol quickly leads you to the best guess for this image, "Biohazard symbol."  You can click on the Wikipedia link, which takes you to an Internet Archive page with the history of this symbol's development .  (Interestingly, the symbol's designer, is quoted as saying that "...".)  You can hear a great 99%-invisible article, but NOT a podcast, on this topic at their Biohazard .      1.  This blue cross (it really IS blue) with a stick and a snake that I found on an inside wall:  What does it mean?  Where would you normally see this?  How important is this to me?  Here's a photo I found in a building: ...