Seeing this kind of thing made me writeup last week’s Challenge:

Can you find an animal that’s closely linked to a particular profession? What’s the animal? What’s the profession? And what’s the connection?

This is both a fun question (which animals can you think of?), and a hard question: HOW would you do this search.

From looking at the comments this week, it’s clear that lots of people knew things off the top of their head.

Jon remembered that: lab rats / scientists or guinea pigs / scientists go together, and that canaries / coal-miners are often mentioned in the same breath. A bit later he also came up with: corgis / Queen Elizabeth (which is clever, but not really a profession, per se).

Ramón thought about shepherd dogs / shepherds and snakes / medicine, as well as pigeons / mail carriers.

Remmij came up a great list: donkey, elephant, lame ducks / politicians as well as bears, bulls / stockbrokers. And, the remarkable: dolphins / submariners.

Gauche Murleau came up with sharks / lawyers. (Not all associations need be positive!)

Marydee recalled that librarians / cats (and more generally, booksellers / cats).

While Chris also thought of doctors / tropical fish, although this is stretching the relationship thing just a bit.

BUT…


… all of these are basically remembered by each of the readers. Almost nobody did a search to find these things.

How would you approach this kind of a problem?

In my case, I thought about it this way: “What terms would people use to write about such relationships?” and “What patterns of language would they use?”

Once I’ve figured that out, I can try to create a query that expresses that pattern.

I started by looking at job/animal pairs that I already knew about. Since I already knew that snakes are often used in iconography about doctors, I did this search:

I was looking for common language expressions that I might use as queries. If you look in the Wikipedia article about the Caduceus, you’ll find phrases like “…symbol of medicine” and “…symbol of healthcare.”

That suggests to me that looking for patterns like [ “symbol of *” ] might be useful.

So I experimented with that for a while, learning that this pattern is WAY too general. To make it work, I had tog restrict it with additional terms like this:

[ “symbol of *” profession ] or [ “symbol of *” job ]

and I found a few things (such as the pineapple as the symbol of hospitality). But it’s not quite right.

What I really want to ask my search engine is:

[ Find me an animal that is symbolic of an entire profession ]

But (currently) there’s no good way to say this.

Finding a profession / animal pair is tricky–both are difficult to describe. So when you’ve got a search Challenge like this, you have to think about other ways to express it.

So I experimented with searches like:

[ animal emblem profession ]
[ animal mascot job ]
[ animal symbol of vocation ]

and then switching those terms around in various combinations. Notice that I tried synonyms of the emblem/mascot/symbol and of the profession/job/vocation.

They all kind-of worked, and by searching with repeated combinations, I was able to find a few more things (mostly repeats from above).

Then I thought to try Images as a way to search for these things. And that was surprisingly a bit more productive.

I wasn’t able to find many more than the ones the incredible SRS folks already commented on.. but this was a great search task!

Search Lessons

1. Use your social network. In this case, all of the readers of SearchResearch is an impressive “hive mind” you can tap into. You might not be a blogger, but this is one reason to create and curate your own social network. Be at least occasionally a Twitter, G+, Facebook user: It gives you access to people who can think very differently than you do. That difference in perspective can be a valuable thing.

2. Use more specific terms. As we saw, sometimes you have to do these kinds of searches one-at-a-time, instead of looking for ambiguous terms like “profession,” uses particular jobs (like “doctor”) or categories (like “teamster” or “scientist”) instead of a less determined term

3. Try other modes. In this Challenge, looking in Images was helpful. (I also tried Videos and Books, but they didn’t work out.) But often, switching resource types can give you a great set of suggestions.

I hope you enjoyed this Challenge. Your answers were excellent!

Search on!