mortiz080

What makes a page difficult to find?  (Part 2) I was impressed by how well (and how quickly!) SRS readers were able to figure these out.  Some of the search paths were lovely and inspired.  Nice work, Readers!   Here's what I did.  Let me repeat the two Challenges and then tell you what I did to answer them.   1.  This happens to me more often that I would like:   Images in my blog will sometimes go missing in action.  This happens when a website disappears, leaving my nice link to their image with a gaping hole.  Perhaps you've seen it on other web sites--the hole looks like this:  A broken image link leaves behind a hole-in-the-page.  I want to find a replacement image.  O ne that looks the same as this missing image! How can I find a replacement image for this hole in my blog?  In other words, can you find this missing image?   This hole-in-the-blog comes from  the SRS post of December...

What makes a page difficult to find?  (Part 2) As we saw last week, sometimes you remember the page, but have difficulty figuring out the exact words for your query.  In one case, I remembered seeing an article on a topic (the American author disputing a Wikipedia article), but the results were filled with Wikipedia results, which in this case, really didn't help.  So we used the  – site: operator to exclude those results.   The other example from last week was to find an article about a black racer snake from the New Jersey government educational site.  There, we had to use the right domain name (site:NJ.gov) and search in that part of the NJ web site with site:NJ.GOV.   This week, I have two other "difficult to find" problems that I hope you can solve.  These are both a bit more tricky than last week's and require a bit more sophisticated search knowledge, so I hope you're up to the Challenge!   1.  This happens to me mo...

There are many reasons...    ... why a particular page might be difficult to find.  Sometimes your memory is just plain wrong; sometimes your memory is so generic as to not remember anything that would let you pick the right page out of thousands of similar pages; sometimes the page is really missing (that is, a 404 error--web page missing).   The Challenges from last week are interesting examples of Difficult-Web-Pages.  Let's talk about how to find these, and why they're tough.   1.  A while ago I remember reading an article about a famous US author that was having some difficulty editing his own Wikipedia page.  As crazy as it sounds, they wanted to have independent verification of what he was saying.  I found myself wanting to re-read that article so I could refer to it in my writing.  I needed to find it to confirm details.  This was my Challenge:      Who was the famous US author that was involved in a...

Every so often you know  a web page exists, but it's tough to put your finger on it.   This last week I had several search Challenges pop up in my work.  Here are a couple of questions I found myself asking, and was ultimately able to resolve.  Can you?   This is Part 1 of a series of "Difficult Web Page" search Challenges.  These first two aren't so hard--Part 2 will be more challenging.  Each of these Difficult Web Page SearchResearch Challenges is intended to highlight one particular method for doing your web searches with precision and skill.   A black racer rising up out of the grass.  Thanks & P/C Continis  on Flickr. --> 1.  A while ago I remember reading an article about a famous US author that was having some difficulty editing his own Wikipedia page.  As crazy as it sounds, they wanted to have independent verification of what he was saying.  I found myself wanting to re-read that ...