
A Google a Day - bharatkhatri14
http://www.agoogleaday.com/
======
BickNowstrom
These days, you can not have Pub Quizes with at least a few teams cheating by
using a phone to Google the answers. Knowing trivia of the top of your head
seems to have become as useful a skill as calligraphy.

A friend of mine was about to fall for a hoax/scam. And even though they
changed the words and meaning of quite a few elements, I was able to pinpoint
the exact scam using carefully crafted Google queries.

With Google there is just no way to bullshit people anymore. Someone would
tell a strong story in the 90s during a birthday, and you'd have to go to
library the next day to verify or discard it. Not anymore.

Someone asked why those old modems made noise, and instead of giving an answer
right away, it took all of 15 seconds to find the answer online, much better
than I ever could answer it.

I remember my first job skill test. It was multiple choice and you were
allowed to use the internet. I answered all questions by Googling keywords
from the question, in combination with keywords from each answer, and looking
which combination gave the most results. Answering this way I got a near
perfect score. There were questions about programming languages I hadn't even
written a "Hello World"-example for.

With all this goodness, comes of course the danger of relying on Google for
all your answers. If it is not on the first page of the results it is not
true. Especially younger people believe a lot of facts they find online.
Another danger is using Google for confirming a bias: With so many pages
online, there is bound to be a page in the results that agrees with your
initial hunch, however incorrect it is.

I participated in the pilot for Google Answers. There were people there that,
if the answer was to be found anywhere online, could answer it, no matter
their expertise on the subject. Googling well is a valuable skill.

~~~
ryandrake
> With Google there is just no way to bullshit people anymore.

The existence of spam, nigerian prince scams, "Windows Tech Support" scammers,
phishing, etc. show there's more than enough bullshit to go around. At what
rate do they say suckers are born?

~~~
50CNT
> At what rate do they say suckers are born?

About 4/s[0], considering newborns are all suckers, both regarding their
knowledge of scams and more literal minded sucking.

That said, I'd be interesting to know what the percentage of suckers is by age
against a broad spectrum of scams. That said, someone who can tell a tech
support scam in seconds might still fall for the Chinese Tea house scam (two
women invite foreigner for tea at teahouse, owner shakes foreigner down for
money). Or the China Stock Options scam (foreigners can't own stock in pre-IPO
Chinese company. This makes stock option agreements with foreigners null and
void). Or the China Investment scam (where you get treated as a cheap dev team
instead of a viable investment). Anywayys, I'm getting carried away.

[0][http://www.ecology.com/birth-death-rates/](http://www.ecology.com/birth-
death-rates/)

------
danso
FWIW, if you enjoy this kind of stuff, you might like Daniel Russell's (Google
research scientist, creator of A Google A Day) blog on using Google Search for
research (and research on how people use search):

[http://searchresearch1.blogspot.com/](http://searchresearch1.blogspot.com/)

He regularly posts quirky challenges (What kind of cow is in this picture? Can
you see the Farallon Islands from San Francisco, and where should you stand at
what time of year to best see them?). Also contains lots of useful information
about the state of the query and engine, such as which search operators have
been deprecated, or which obscure search operators no one seems to know about.

~~~
petra
That's a good start but looking up discrete facts is far less useful that
looking up deep answers or articles about very specific subjects. I wish
Google taught that.

~~~
danso
I think researchers might argue that looking for deep answers almost always
depends on being able to look up and efficiently collate discrete facts that
are straightforward when considered in isolation.

~~~
divbit
There should be two parts: part 1. Gather as many facts as possible part 2.
Separate the wheat facts from the chaff(sp?) facts in relation to whatever
problem you are working on

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squeaky-clean
Some of these were neat, some were really stupid.

"What do you learn the definition of on page 21 of the 2011/2012 Official
Rules of the NBA" was "legal goal" really? It doesn't say that anywhere on the
page. "legal field goal" didn't work, "Scoring and Timing" didn't work (the
header of the page). None of the other definitions on Page 21 worked, there's
a few. The only mention of "legal goal" is in the Index where it points to
page 21.

~~~
hoorayimhelping
it was field goal, which is the common name used in statistics and broadcasts.

~~~
squeaky-clean
Ah, when I used the first letters hint, it said they were L and G, not F and
G, strange.

------
jannyfer
In a review of Google Home, I was amazed to learn that you can ask "Who is the
guy that plays God in a lot of movies" and Google will answer back with Morgan
Freeman.

I'd love to try asking the questions from this site to Google Home and see how
it does.

~~~
dwe3000
George Burns? (kidding - Morgan Freeman does a great job too).

~~~
droidist2
Burns was good as both God and the Devil in "Oh, God! You Devil"

------
mamurphy
With this and
[https://quickdraw.withgoogle.com/](https://quickdraw.withgoogle.com/),
whether I want to play super-obscure-trivia or draw stick figures, google has
me covered.

~~~
jasonkostempski
Is this actually by Google? I couldn't easily figure that out.

~~~
jeron
have you tried Googling it?

Jokes aside, yes it's from google.
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Google_A_Day](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Google_A_Day))

------
stonesam92
This reminds me of "The Wikipedia Game" we'd play at school.

You'd all start on one random page, and race to get to some completely
unrelated target page, only by clicking through links to other pages.

It was always surprising how few degrees of separation there were between
wildly unrelated topics.

~~~
farnsworth
We played that too, I think we called it "five clicks to Jesus (or Hitler)" or
something. After a while you learn which pages will probably be very long and
general and will be good jumping off places to head in a new direction.

~~~
droidist2
I just did this starting with the movie "Oh, God! You Devil":

\- James Cromwell

\- Category: American people of German descent

\- Category: Ambassadors of Germany to the United States

\- Hans-Heinrich Dieckhoff

\- Adolf Hitler

~~~
farnsworth
That one is easy if you're trying to get to Jesus :)

------
giarc
This seems pretty fun however navigation seems a bit difficult. Some links
from Google results wouldn't open and I had to open in a different tab, then
go back to the main tab. Not sure if it's my browser or the game?

~~~
supermdguy
I had the same experience with unopenable links. I just did everything in a
separate tab.

------
emodendroket
Wish it gave me some sense of how my score stacked up to others.

~~~
chrisfosterelli
FWIW, I had a total score around 1850. It took me quite a while to figure the
first one out but the second two were faster.

~~~
barsonme
Same, 1807. I got hung up on the first one since I didn't know we could click
links.

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Grue3
The fact that it requires to type in the exact answer (for its own definition
of exact) is annoying. The first question I got was how Hemingway's
protagonists are called. Let's say the answer is "A B". Well, the answer I had
to type in was "The Hemingway A B". Both "The" and "Hemingway" are mandatory.

Later the question was what musical period was the definition of symphony,
sonata etc. standartized in. I copy pasted "C period", it didn't work, so I
tried some other ones. Well, apparently "C" was the correct answer all along.

------
schoen
In the early 1990s there was a very conceptually similar game called the
Internet Hunt:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Internet_Hunt](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Internet_Hunt)

An example of the very first one, from August 1992:

[http://www.ibiblio.org/history/1sthunt.txt](http://www.ibiblio.org/history/1sthunt.txt)

Google has definitely made these a lot easier, so the questions have had to
get a lot harder!

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cryptozeus
Very hard to use it on mobile phone

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gberger
They should call you out for directly googling the question, as it defeats the
point, since you would get the answer only because the exact question was
posted on some forum.

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wnevets
I had a trailing space and it said my answer was wrong

~~~
glup
ya, it had a trailing space.

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notatoad
this sounds like fun, but the first query i did threw up a firefox "blocked by
content security policy" error.

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progval
Looks like a nice way for Google to train a machine learning model to answer
trivia questions

~~~
jaimehrubiks
Looks like a nice way for Google to prove that their ML model has made us into
thinking we are indeed teaching it how to answer trivia questions.

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magic_beans
What's the point of this? To learn how to use google search?

Who is the intended audience?

~~~
jeron
it's a game, imo it's a lot of fun

------
0003
Anyone else's comp become a turbine?

------
jeron
are the questions always the same?

~~~
homerguy69
I believe its a set of three new ones everyday

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sksixk
i remember a game very similar to this (that i used to participate in and do
very poorly) back around mid 90s that people used to play online. except you'd
use things like archie and gopher. i don't remember the details but someone(s)
would come up with questions and you'd have to find the answers online using
these tools (before google).

anyone remember this game? my recollection is hazy but i think the questions
were sent out periodically and teams would rush to get them all answered
first.

~~~
pimlottc
I remember something similar that was based on a website that would post
questions that would lead you, after searching, to some particular site. Once
you found the right page, there would be a logo for the game (something round
with question marks?) that would take back to the original site and give you
points for finding it. They kept a running tally that was used for a leader
board and I think possibly some sort of prizes? I vaguely recall some sort of
name like "Riddler" or something, but I have never been able to track down
anything about it outside my own memory...

