The tale of a difficult search (hard for me at least)

In the category of hard search problems caused by the way your mind works…

I wandered into my manager’s office yesterday and mentioned that I read on article about how mathematicians have a new wiki-like website to jointly solve big, hairy, complicated problems.   

“It’s incredibly cool,” I said, “they post problems, math-geeks work on them collaboratively and collectively real work gets done quickly.” 

He was skeptical.  “I ran something like that back in the day…and it petered out after a while.  Still, what’s the URL?”  He turned to the keyboard waiting to hear. 

And I couldn’t remember.  So, being a good researcher, I started searching and found that it didn’t pop to the top.

Here’s what I knew at the moment: 

•  It was an article I’d read within the past couple of days.
•  I thought I’d read it in Newsweek.
•  I knew it was about math, and probably had the words Wiki or Blog in it since it was about working together.
•  The article was about mathematicians working collaboratively.

I just wanted to find the article.  Should be simple, no?

Well… it wasn’t.  Let me recap my search for you. 

Here’s where I started—searching for a news article within the past week (limited by the left-hand side nav restrictions)

[ math group proof ]   -- I set the left-hand nav to search“Everything” and “Within last week” 

Nothing.  Many of the results were invaded by the recent announcement of an attempted proof that P ≠ NP.  Still, I tried again, altering  “proof” to “proves”…

[ math social group proves ]

Then adding in the idea of “social” proof…

[ math social group prove social ]

And taking a new tack, tried adding in “blog”

[ math group proof blog ]

I had a half-baked notion that the wiki/blog/thing I was looking for was called “polymath” (it would be a clever name), but the results looked unpromising.  So..

[ polymath wiki Newsweek ]

I’d searched for about 15 minutes at this point and… I gave up for a bit.  Just to let my brain stew on this for a bit.  This is sometimes a good idea. 

I came back to the search after an hour with a new search term in mind:  “crowdsource”! 

So I tried the obvious first search,  using the new search term and adding in Newsweek to restrict the search.  Again I limited my search to the last week. 

[ crowd-sourced wiki Newsweek  ]   

(I didn’t use a SITE: restrict because I didn’t want to overly constrain the search to JUST Newsweek.  I thought that perhaps a newspaper might mention “In the recent Newsweek article…”  And I’d be good to go. 

But this wasn’t good either.  But I figured maybe if I just added back in the MATH term, that would be even more focused.  So I tried:

[ crowdsourced wiki Newsweek math ]

Which showed me a link to the Interceder site (a news aggregator site) that collected information on (in this case) “crowdsource” article. 

I scrolled through their collection of articles, and finding it long (and tiny font!), I used Control-F to look for “math” in the text. 

FINALLY I got a break.  About half-way down the page there was a link to an article on Dr. Dobb’s Journal  (a pretty well-known computer / technology magazine) with the intriguing title: “Massively Collaborative Math ” (Aug 9, 2010)

Paydirt!  The Dr. Dobbs article then pointed me to an article in the San Jose Mercury News.  (Which is my local newspaper.) 

San Jose Mercury – “Stanford and UC Berkeley create massively collaborative math”

  

Now... what’s odd here?  Why was this search so hard for me? 

1.  I didn’t remember that it was a site at UC Berkeley… or that Stanford was also involved.  (I live close to Stanford and have even taught there!  How could I have NOT remembered that about the news item?) 

2.  I misremembered the source.  I would have sworn it was Newsweek and NOT the Mercury News.  But I should have known better.  (When I got home that evening I found Newsweek on my desk—it was just the most recent thing I’d read, NOT the actual source of my initial read.) 

3.  I correctly remembered that I’d read it recently, but I did NOT remember that it was that same day!  (In fact, just 5 hours earlier.) 

Retrospect:  Looking back, what could I have done differently? 

It’s clear that using the word “crowdsource” was the key breakthrough.  Since the article was very recent, a very simple query [ crowdsource math ] brings up 3 perfectly good hits on the MathOverflow site.  (Although I recognize that this search probably won’t work correctly in a year or so…) 

And, in the end, all of my floundering around with terms like “Newsweek” and “wiki” were not productive.  The article I really was trying to find (the newspaper article) wasn’t on Newsweek at all.  I should know better:  Let the search engine search… that’s what it’s good at. 

I should have focused my efforts on looking for better terms to describe the thing I was looking for.  “Crowdsourcing” turned out to be the key term that got me to the target.  

Sometimes, I have to take my own advice.