Wednesday, May 12, 2010

Wednesday Search Challenge (May 12, 2010) - Searching for something someone once said

A few weeks ago we talked about the difficulty of tracking down original quotations.  (Remember the post about Mark Twain?)  


Now, this time, the search is much closer to home.  


This question, like many of the challenges, started out with someone telling me something just a bit funny, and then I run off and try to track it down.  


This time one of my friends said "You know, I saw that you were quoted in the New York Times!  You must be famous!"  


Well, I'm not sure the two statements go together, but when I looked I found it was true.  A few years ago I WAS quoted in the New York Times.  


As a Search Challenge, though, finding it proved to be revealing of a few heuristics one might like to know when embarking on such a search.  


So... can you find it?  Can you find the place in the New York Times where I was quoted a few years ago?  
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4 comments:

  1. krossbowMay 12, 2010 at 6:54 AM

    http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/19/technology/circuits/19next.html

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  2. Dan RussellMay 12, 2010 at 9:41 AM

    Fred -- That's right. Now... HOW did you find it? Did you do anything special? (We'd like to read about what, if anything, special you did.)

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  3. DavidMay 12, 2010 at 11:27 AM

    Actually, I found three other times you were quoted in the NYT:

    http://www.nytimes.com/2002/03/14/technology/what-s-next-point-shoot-and-translate-into-english.html

    http://www.nytimes.com/2001/09/09/business/09IBMM.html?pagewanted=all

    http://www.nytimes.com/2001/04/22/magazine/22CONNECTIVITY.html?pagewanted=all

    and there may be many others, but they haven't been discavered (to semi-quote Tom Lehrer)

    I searched for "Daniel Russell site:nytimes.com" but that gave me too many unrelated hits, so I added "IBM" to the search string, since I knew you were at IBM a few years ago, and found those three hits (as well as many irrelevant items).

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  4. krossbowMay 13, 2010 at 6:23 AM

    I first searched for "dan russell" "new york times" thinking that using a form of Daniel might be the trick. No luck. Switched to "daniel russell" "new york times" and still wasn't happy with the results.

    Since you said "a few years ago" I went to Show Search Tools on the side and used a custom date range for things prior to 2009. One of the top results mentioned "web search" and that's the one I went with.

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