Is it a parrot, or a parakeet, or… C. c. ludovicianus by John James Audubon. This is the blue subspecies variant of the green/yellow Carolina Parakeet (C. c. carolensis) P/C Wikimedia.Last week’s Challenge was pretty straig…
Searching by image… What plant is this? Can search-by-image help?… is a fundamental skill for SearchResearchers. You should know how to use regular Google Search-by-Image (see this for a refresher), and you should know how to use G…
I started this blog with the idea of writing a book… … in the very first post I wrote: In the back of my head, I want something tangible to emerge from this. Ideally, a book, or a series of books, about how people search… how they…
It’s been a long and trying year… Dawn of 2022, or sunset of 2021, depending on your mood…. so this week in SRS is a great time to reflect on what’s passed during the year. To summarize, here’s a list of all 60 posts made this year…
What DO you notice? Renewal labels from several magazines. Notice anything odd here? In my case, I notice things that vary from what I expected (e.g., the non-development of land south of the Carquinez strait or the difficult…
I noticed something odd the other day… Renewal labels from several magazines. Notice anything odd here? As you know, oddities–the things that don’t quite fit into the normal patterns–often lead to SearchResearch Challenges.&nb…
Search by image… … has always been an incredibly useful thing to be able to do. Google has had a “Search by Image” function for quite a while. (Since 2011.) We discussed it first in SearchResearch in 2018, and we talked about…
I got curious… … so I did a little follow-up research. Although I had a PDF of The Book of St. Albans, I somehow could not find the terms of venery in the file. And that bothered me. As Isaac Asimov said, “the most …
Murder, charm, pod, stand…From Pexabay.com (free images!) … they’re all supposed to be names for groups of animals. But are they, really? Or are they simply made up by someone as a kind of joke? Such questions …
You know that a bunch of crows is… From Pexabay.com (free images!) … often called a murder of crows. Likewise, you might have heard of a charm of hummingbirds, a stand of flamingos, a cloud of bats, etc. &n…
There’s much to learn here… … and since the previous post was growing so long, I separated out the SRS Lessons Learned section for today. Let’s dive right in… SearchResearch Lessons Learned This Challenge–trying …
This kind of question is difficult to answer… The Challenge was: “Why is the Carquinez Strait so undeveloped on the south side of the channel?” As evidence, I made this map to highlight the area that is still most open ran…
It’s a mystery to me… As I flew out of the San Francisco airport on a clear fall day, I noticed a vast imbalance in the landscape below, an asymmetry that I couldn’t quite understand. See that image above? Notice anything odd about i…
A small celebration is in order…… in total, SRS has, to date … … this week, SearchResearch passed 4 million reads since its inception in January of 2010. I know some number of those reads are by bots, but I suspect t…
Another lesson… As we’ve discussed before, in general, if you just ASK people nicely, they’ll often point you to what you seek. We’ve seen this before in getting copies of papers and articles that are behind paywalls, and in getting prepri…