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A Google a Day

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168 pointsbharatkhatri1466 comments

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.

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

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.

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.

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

I think the page was reverted back soon after, because other teams were doing the same thing from the university IP and there was a temporary blanket hold on edits from our IP when Wikipedia editors noticed what was going on.

> 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?

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

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.

> 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/

> 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 :)

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?

Some people earn income by preparing handwritten calligraphic wedding invitations and signs; plenty of graphic designers (and software developers, for that matter) use paper in the process of preparing a digital product. It's no more of a party trick than playing a musical instrument.

Sure, but the ancestor comment mentioned "typography". I've never heard that used to refer to hand-written stuff (although, perhaps in the past hand-designed stuff.)

calligraphy is part of the typographic process. typography has been around for much longer than vector graphics. font forging, typesetting, type design -- pick any part of the "stack," and go as far back as the northern song dynasty, if you like -- has always involved a lot of hand work. thinking of typography as a superset of calligraphy -- inextricable and dependent on one another -- might help your understanding.

this is also incorrect.

type designers usually start with drawing letters by hand, in fact. this is how it's taught to MA students at the university of reading and at the royal academy in the hague, NL (i.e. the most respected programs that churn out designers to places like monotype). even (especially?) in preliminary sketching phases done with pencil, the drawing method used is specifically meant to best mimic the stroke made with traditional tools.

when it comes to more ornate lettering -- like a script -- hand tools are even more common to start with. it's a bit less common for someone to finish a script before digitizing it and making it suitable for the screen (usually you do a few key letters by hand and can figure out the rest on a computer from there), but it does still happen more than you seem to think.

Thank you, that's actually pretty awesome :)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

Google goes to the movies too! :D

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

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

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!

He's also The Tick!

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.

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

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

have you tried Googling it?

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

Builds some very cool chain of links all leading to Philosophy

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?

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

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.

I had to open in another tab as well.

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

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.

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

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.

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!

Very hard to use it on mobile phone

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.

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

ya, it had a trailing space.

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

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

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.

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

Who is the intended audience?

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

Yes. Humans.

Anyone else's comp become a turbine?

are the questions always the same?

I believe its a set of three new ones everyday

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.

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...

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