Posts

We just finished running… … the updated version of the PowerSearchingWithGoogle.com course. As you might guess, it’s a lot of work to pull all of this content together, making the videos, writing the content, and so on. I’d like to make it as ava…

Fog is a thick cloud of tiny water droplets… … suspended in the air near the ground, reducing visibility to less than 1km. That’s the technical definition. But, as many SearchResearchers found out, sometimes it’s something more than just water dr…

If you’re like me… … you probably think about London as a great metropolitan city–a royal city, a capital, a place of museums, castles, wonderful to visit… and… foggy. Yet in all of my visits to London over the past 20 years, I don’t think I’…

When searching for an insect…… be sure to think about how many insects there are. As we see from the first two butterflies here, insects often seem very similar to each other. And there are milions of insect species, making identification sometime…

Entomologically speaking…… this Challenge shouldn’t be that difficult. But as we’ve seen, sometimes these things can spiral out of control and present real challenges. This summer has been a series of insect encounters. Luckily, few of them have b…

Once again, the reality is more complex… … than I thought. If you’re like me, you thought that there might be as many as 24 time zones. You probably knew that China was all one giant time zone, and that Newfoundland (Canada) was a bit odd. Tim…

As you’ve probably noticed, once you’ve spent some time on a topic–like our Search Challenges–you start to notice these things in your daily life. Comet tales: I know a lot of you have been watching the saga of Rosetta / Philae and the story of Com…

Time zones… … are a 19th century invention, really. TIME has always been around, of course, and for the largest part of human history, time was defined by whenever noon happened locally. That’s easy to figure out, but as tech advanced, we suddenl…

Three different building shapes… How hard can it be to give names to these? Here’s what I did to figure these out… 1. What is this kind of building called? Why does it have this distinctive shape? Building Type A: It’s located at 47.5529417,-12…

I have to admit… … that figuring out Building Type A was a little tricky. It took me about 90 minutes of searching before I found the path that worked. But I WILL tell you that between the post and the comments, you have all the information you n…

As you know, my MOOC (“Massive Open Online Course”) called PowerSearchingWithGoogle.com has been fairly successful. We opened it a little over two years ago, and it’s had a bit more than 600,000 students go through the materials. I’m happy to say tha…

I have to admit that I’m fascinated… … by old industrial buildings. Maybe it’s a side-effect of having grown up in Los Angeles, where there were many older buildings from the industries that abounded in south-central LA. I saw all of these buildi…

This kind of question comes up all the time… HOW do you find official information sources, especially for events happening outside of your normal information channels? The Challenge for this week was pretty easy to state–the Challenge is all about …