Friday, September 8, 2017

AGoogleADay.com is back up!

The AGoogleADay.com test-your-search-skills site is back up.    (It's been down for a bit over the summer.)  

Check it out!  




This is a great way to practice and improve your online research skills.  

(And it's especially handy for information literacy and classroom teachers.) 

Each day supplies 3 Search Challenges in a number of areas, Science, History, Geography, Culture.  Some are easy, a few are tough, but they're all solvable... if you know how to do online search!  

Check it out.  (And if you're a teacher, consider working into your daily routine.)  

Search on! 

12 comments:

  1. Very fun! 1872 total points first time playing. Without spoiling the answer to one of today's questions (What was the birth name of the Renaissance man responsible for the “ornithopter?”), I had a "wrong" answer, as wikipedia (among a bunch of other more respectable sites) lists a "full" birth name for that person that all agree, and it didn't like that answer.

    Are there any rules that we should be aware of, such as "all answers are 1 word"?

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    1. Yeah... turns out it's really hard to write recognition code that will do all possible permutations of a "correct" name, especially one like that. There's no quick heuristic to give you other than "try a bunch of variations" and check the "show first letter" -- that will give you a guide.

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  2. Interesting. I would of thought the questions/answers would be hard coded. If you wrote the code and/or on the project, would you mind posting a little bit how the questions and answers get generated?

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  3. Another issue I ran into. The source I used had a macron over one of the letters, and I copied/pasted the answer. The anglicized answer was correct, without the macron, but the more formal spelling wasn't. For your answer engine, you could accept any equivalent ascii characters, so macrons, umlauts, etc.

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    Replies
    1. The answers are matched by a regular expression that was written by the question/answer author. These folks are mostly content matter experts, not computer science majors. I agree this would be a great thing to have. (But it's a lot more work to make it happen...)

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  4. Question 2 is wrong. Charles 1 was killed in 1649 so how did he receive anything in 1682 ?

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    Replies
    1. It's a typo. Should be 1628, not 1682. (Will fix.)

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  5. Replies
    1. Hmmm... I see a 3rd question ("What was the highest political office held by the third husband of the woman who was later married to the first husband of Patti Sacks?") Try doing a reload of the page.

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