A Google a Day

http://www.agoogleaday.com/

168 66 9 years ago

mamurphy• 9 years ago

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

jasonkostempski• 9 years ago

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

jeron3• 9 years ago

have you tried Googling it?

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

emodendroket• 9 years ago

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

chrisfosterelli• 9 years ago

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• 9 years ago

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

danso5• 9 years ago

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/

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• 9 years ago

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.

danso5• 9 years ago

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.

jannyfer• 9 years ago

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.

LouisSayers• 9 years ago

It's like when you Google 'Eyebrow kid', and you get back Will Poulter... it's like... but how does Google know?! hahaha

euyyn• 9 years ago

Google goes to the movies too! :D

dwe3000• 9 years ago

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

droidist22• 9 years ago

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

squeaky-clean3• 9 years ago

The Google voice stuff is really impressive. It also holds context between queries. One of the things I've asked it that I think was most impressive, I was watching Archer and recognized a voice

"Ok, Google, who's the voice actor for Rip Riley on Archer?"

"Patrick Warburton"

"Ok, Google, what else has he been in?"

It then searched for "What has Patrick Warburton been in". Apparently it's the same guy that voiced Joe Swanson on Family Guy and Brock Samson on Venture Bros, that's how I recognized it!

taneq2• 9 years ago

He's also The Tick!

taneq2• 9 years ago

Yeah, you can search for remarkably vague things these days. Like literally "that movie with the bus that couldn't slow down" - the first two results are for the Simpsons reference and the third is the IMDB page for Speed.

magic_beans• 9 years ago

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

Who is the intended audience?

jeron3• 9 years ago

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

r00fus• 9 years ago

Yes. Humans.

jeron3• 9 years ago

are the questions always the same?

homerguy69• 9 years ago

I believe its a set of three new ones everyday

wnevets• 9 years ago

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

glup• 9 years ago

ya, it had a trailing space.

giarc• 9 years ago

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• 9 years ago

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

gingericha• 9 years ago

Funny, I thought that was how the game was played. It wouldn't let me open up any external sites so I was forced to find my answers directly in the search results. I wish the answers had a bit more give to them. One of mine only accepted "Art Donovan" instead of his full name "Arthur James Donovan Jr". Regardless, it was enjoyable to test my search skills against the clock.

hanksy• 9 years ago

I had to open in another tab as well.

BickNowstrom• 9 years ago

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.

Lxr• 9 years ago

The difference in tech skill between me and my 80 year old Grandma is mostly my ability to Google.

tsm• 9 years ago

I used Google extensively and skillfully throughout my careers as a student and software developer. In the past few years I've been taking the music of 18th century Scotland very seriously, and it's been a major change of pace to have Google be next to useless. Suddenly all the skills I'd let languish—remembering what part of what book I'd read something in, using specialty research databases, inferring the answer to a question from multiple suboptimal sources, etcetera—matter again. Sometimes it's fun, sometimes it's incredibly frustrating.

danso5• 9 years ago

At my university, the radio station held a massive all-day quiz competition. Google was still relatively new, but they adapted by making the questions more compound and reliant on some familiarity in a domain (e.g. What would the mass of the world's heaviest man be in picograms when using the IPK as measured in 1889?).

There was also a scavenger hunt component to the contest. One such item was a photo of a famous annual naked soccer game that you couldn't have had unless you were actually there in previous years. This was before Google Images (I think), so I had my friends go outside in their underwear and then Photoshopped them onto a picture of a soccer field.

Edit: in response to what you said about the dangers of over-relying on Google, I remember there was a quiz question that required knowing some fact that could only be found in some obscure printed book (again, probably before Google Books was around). So I altered a Wikipedia page (each quiz question allowed for several minutes until calling an answer in) to mention a fact that coincidentally matched the answer we called in, and when the radio station said we were wrong, we successfully disputed their answer by sending them a link to the Wikipedia page.

zeptomu• 9 years ago

Out of curiosity. Did you change it back and did you inform the radio station?

ryandrake• 9 years ago

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?

danso5• 9 years ago

In the case of Nigerian scams, it's been hypothesized that the design and medium of that scam is optimized to target the specific people who are not using Google:

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/why-do-...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11909111

eriknstr• 9 years ago

Furthermore, the proliferation of fake news shows that having the tools available does not mean that the tools will be used by everyone all of the time. If we were to check everything always, we'd have no time to do anything else.

50CNT• 9 years ago

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/

tribby3• 9 years ago

as useful a skill as calligraphy.

Typography is a multi billion dollar industry; see Gerrit Noordzij's The Stroke for why the calligraphic stroke is as relevant as ever in the digital age :)

tehwalrus3• 9 years ago

But actually being able to do it with your hands is nothing more than a party trick. Skill in a vector editor is key, and some domain knowledge, but surely not actually hand writing beautifully?

dredmorbius• 9 years ago

Information availability has improved markedly. I make use of online sources, especially archives of previously published works (some legally provided, some not: Project Gutenberg, Hathi Trust, Internet Archive, LibGen, Sci-Hub, ...) constantly. The ability, seconds after having read of some reference, to be looking at scans or PDFs of an original work from the 16th - 20th centuries, is profound.

That said: I'm finding online search itself less useful, and far less reliable, shy of specific filters. There's simply too much crap online. Which leads to the observation: the way to hoax or scam someone, or simply to create ambiguity over the truth, is to pre-seed the search results. There's a phenomenally good case of this in today's Wall Street Journal, concerning a businessman who'd invoked the ire of another who spent years attempting to tarnish the former's reputation.

https://archive.fo/kz1Rt

Which is to say -- there's something of a shift back in the scammers' favour as well. Where the ultimate balance lies I'm not entirely sure.

sksixk• 9 years ago

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• 9 years ago

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...

notatoad• 9 years ago

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

0003• 9 years ago

Anyone else's comp become a turbine?

squeaky-clean3• 9 years ago

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.

reedlaw• 9 years ago

"field goal" worked for me. I had to click the hint button which showed "legitimate".

hoorayimhelping• 9 years ago

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

squeaky-clean3• 9 years ago

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

cryptozeus• 9 years ago

Very hard to use it on mobile phone

stonesam92• 9 years ago

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.

farnsworth2• 9 years ago

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.

droidist22• 9 years ago

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

xinyhn• 9 years ago

Reminds me of... https://xefer.com/wikipedia

Builds some very cool chain of links all leading to Philosophy

gberger• 9 years ago

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.

schoen• 9 years ago

In the early 1990s there was a very conceptually similar game called 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

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

Grue3• 9 years ago

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.

progval• 9 years ago

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

jaimehrubiks• 9 years ago

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.

A Google a Day

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