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 more often that I would like: Images in my blog (THIS 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–the hole looks like this:
A broken image link leaves behind a hole-in-the-page. I want to find a replacement image–one that looks the same as this missing image!
Arrgh! This is frustrating, but an inevitable consequence of having companies go out of business. This causes link-rot and that makes the target of the link (in this case, the image of a remote-control glider) go missing. It shows a broken image icon instead.
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 14, 2011 and shows a particular remote-control glider. (In fact, it’s one that I built back in the late 1990s.)
The Challenge for skilled SRS-ers is to (a) figure out what that image looked like, and (b) find that image somewhere else on the internet. Can you?
A related difficult to find web page relies on a different technique… but it’s also a toughie. Can you answer this dessert-related Challenge?
2. A while ago I was having dinner at a hole-in-the-wall Turkish restaurant somewhere in Europe and had a fantastic dessert. It was rich, creamy, simple and wonderful. I wrote down the name–kaymak–so I could find it again at a place closer to home. My Challenge was to find a place near me (that is, in Mountain View, California) that sells kaymak. Can you find a place in Mountain View, CA that sells this fantastic dessert?
(Note that I do not want clotted cream, nor do I want to buy it through online purchase, I want real kaymak that I can eat today!!
For extra credit (and this is the difficult part)–How much does this place in Mountain View sell it for?
These two Challenges need very different and fairly advanced techniques. If you can solve both of these, you can rate yourself as a Jedi-level SearchResearcher!
Please let us know how you solved the Challenges–and be as clear as possible in HOW you did it. (For these Challenges, you need more than a clever query and the use of site:)
Search on!
