We live in an information rich world...
... but with the rise of COVID-19 / Coronavirus, we've been living in an information universe that is overwhelmed by a tsunami of content--some of it good, some it misleading, some of it questionable, and some of it outright wrong and dangerous.
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| P/C CDC.govhttps://www.cdc.gov/ |
I can't ignore this outsize opportunity to help people with their medical searchs. So...
Rather than pose yet-another-Challenge for you, I'd like for you to share what YOUR personal COVID-related research Challenges are. We'll talk about them, and discuss in the comments. From this discussion thread, I'll summarize some of the SRS issues that arise, and what strategies and tactics we should be adopting as a way to cut through the noise and get to the useful and correct information.
So, let me pose this week's Challenge to you like this:
1. During the past 2 weeks, what SearchResearch Challenges have you confronted about COVID-19 / Coronavirus?
2. What did you do to try and answer those Research Questions?
Naturally, I'm curious about what you're asking, and how you're answering those questions.
Frankly, I find myself being a bit obsessive about COVID data from multiple sources. I have one display that shows nothing but data feeds from different monitoring agencies (e.g. the CDC, Wikipedia data visualization, Johns Hopkins University, Google's data, etc.). I'm trying to triangulate my sources to see what's going on.
One of my RQs is "what's the most accurate data source?" This is a huge problem, especially when there's so much variance between the data sources, and when there's so much political investment at stake.
So... What are your questions? And, what are you doing to answer your questions?
Let's chat. See you in the discussion thread. (Since I'm now working-from-home, I'll be responding more often than usual.)
Note: Google does have a pretty good COVID-19 website up and running. Check there.
Another note... I'm also ramping up production of a few short videos to become better searchers. You'll start seeing these coming out tomorrow, with roughly one or two a week for the duration. This is a restart of the 1MM series ("One-Minute Morceaux" like this one on Word Order Matters) that I ran a while back. Each is a short video between 1 and 4 minutes long with a brief SRS strategy or tactic for you. Let me know how you like them!
Search on!
