Syndicated Posts

You never know what you’ll find in the hills… In my case, I found the remnants of two 19th century mining towns! How did we do this week? Remember that the Challenge questions were: 1. What were the names of the towns located near 37.1832161, -1…

As you know, I like to go trail running… … and once upon a time, I used to run the trails in these hills. This is a view from one of my favorite trails, not far from 37.1832161,-121.8543355 Near where I took this picture, there’s the vestige of an…

So.. was it a real plant! The book I was reading told me this plant existed in Ancient Rome, and was so valuable that it was depicted on ancient coins as an emblem of wealth. Strangely, It was valuable partly because it was used as both a medicine AND…

Remember our ongoing discussion of the Farallons? (Can you see the Farallons from San Francisco)? I finally got to the beach to check it out on foot, IRL. As a reminder, here’s a shot of the Farallon Islands from the parking lot at Sutro Baths (about…

How to see a place in two views… … at the same time? That’s really the essence of this Challenge. My goal is to allow for easy comparisons between an A and B version of photographs taken from the same place. To do this, I’ve given you two images…

In my reading… … I, like you, often run across things that I really need to look up. But this thing-I-had-to-Look-Up really got my attention because it seems so… improbable. The article I was reading was set in Ancient Rome, and described a mys…

Sometimes… … you just want to see your search results sorted by date. How can you do this? Turns out it’s not hard, just slightly obscure. Here’s a simple way to do it… First, do your search, then limit by time, THEN you can sort the results by …

Seeing a place once… … and then seeing it again 10 years later is often a shock, but also sometimes a revelation. Things change, places are transformed, the new washes in–and if you look over a long enough period, you can see the planet change. …

We see things all the time… .. you often just don’t notice. This is part of the complexity of this Challenge–you see these visual effects often, but we almost never talk about them. If that’s true, HOW do you search for them? Here’s what I did t…

Hi folks… I’ll be back tomorrow to answer our SRS Challenge from last week. (I forgot that I’d be speaking at a conference today, so today is full of preparations for that talk.) It’s not all work, work, work though. The conference is on a lovely …

It’s graduation season. Last month (May, 2017) I was fortunate to be asked to give the commencement address at the University of Maryland’s Information School. As you might know, I hang out there from time to time talking about information-y things, a…

Seeing is complicated and subtle. Of course, it works really well most of the time. We see colors, textures, print, cats, people, silver moonlight on the river, smiles, and that expression from your beloved. But sometimes vision gets more complicate…

As you might have expected, there are many answers. I’m not surprised, but the variety of answers (and questions) DID surprise me! SRS readers have a wide variety of interests! This week’s Challenge is about what kinds of SearchResearch questions co…

I wanted to highlight an interesting discussion that’s been happening in the comments of last week’s Challenge. Regular Reader Diane asked a great question: “… [is] there is a way to order Google search results by date?I did a search on [“search les…