SearchResearch Challenge (5/25/21): What's your story of SearchResearch?

SearchResearch Challenge (5/25/21): What’s your story of SearchResearch?

Dan Russell • May 26, 2021

Republished with permission from SearchReSearch

SearchResearch Challenge (5/25/21): What’s your story of SearchResearch? Dan Russell

It's a complicated time...

Looking out to sea

.. and the next week or so will be especially complicated, so rather than have me post a Challenge, I'd like to hear from you, my Regular SRS Readers (R-SRS-Rs).

1. What's YOUR SRS story? Have you had to do a search for something recently where there was a bit of a Challenge along the way? Was it something not-completely obvious that you needed to work out, or look up, or correlate? What's your tale of SRS?

It doesn't have to be earth-shatteringly brilliant or complex, but maybe something that sheds a little light onto a research issue that you had to confront.

For instance, this past week I searched for air purifiers. (Fire season is coming to California soon, and I want to have SOME ability to clean the air in my home.)

So I spent about an hour looking up how air purifiers work, which models seems to work best, etc.

Much to my surprise, people report that homemade air purifiers (which are significantly cheaper than commercial ones) do just about as good of a job. Here's a great article from the NYTimes on how to DIY an air purifier on a budget.

I just used the methods we talked about in an earlier SRS episode on Searching for DIY information. Most of my time was spent in comparison--looking at the different models, makers, capacities, etc. I ended up buying a couple for my home, but I'll probably build a third one, just so I can compare the DIY vs. commercial models. (Of course, then I'll also have to purchase a decent air quality measuring device, but I'll do that next week.)

So this wasn't a hard task, but it was a good SRS time. I did my searches, took my notes, and had a surprising outcome (homebuilt is about as good as commercial).