Answer: Who designed this stained glass?

 This should have been easy... 

... but it wasn't.  If you've been around the SearchResearch Rancho for a while, your first instinct would have been to just use Google Lens to search for the image.  That's what I did.  

But... as usual, there's more to the story... 

Here were our presenting questions for the week:  

1. Where is this stained glass? 

2. Who designed it? 

Let's tackle both questions at once. 

IF you use Google Lens with a right-click (then "Search this image with Google Lens,") you might get a result like this, telling us that it's in the Church of St. Mary, Slough, in England.  

Google Lens search on window; first result is completely wrong. 

Nice. HOWEVER... If you click through to that image of stained glass in the Church of St. Mary's, you see that it's NOT a match. 

If, on the other hand, you click the "AI Mode" button on the image search panel (shown in bold in the image below), you get a different answer.  Here, the result shows that it's the window "Land is Bright" in the Washington National Cathedral, designed by John Piper.   

That's an interesting answer, but wrong.  If you do a regular Image search for ["Land is bright" Washington National Cathedral stained glass] you see this image, which clearly is NOT our target.  Oops.  

"Land is bright" window at the National Cathedral, DC.
P/C Wikimedia

It's a beautiful window, but as I always say, CHECK YOUR ANSWERS!  This one is clearly wrong.  

On the other hand, another thing I always say is that "incorrect answers can sometimes give you a clue..."  

In the very first Google Lens result, the second image points to a window at the Washington DC National Cathedral.  If you click on that result, it takes you to a page about Pentecost in 2022, but with an image of our target window.  This is a big hint: We're getting closer!  Stay on the trail!

Even though this isn't the final result, it does suggest we should check the windows at the National Cathedral.  A quick search for [stained glass windows of the National Cathedral] takes us to the Wikipedia Category for this topic.  A Category page is a collection of all the windows at the cathedral.  Simply paging through the collection takes you rapidly to this page:  "Founding of a New Nation" which tells us that this the answer we seek. 

Answer:  This is a "a stained glass clerestory window above the George Washington Bay in the south nave of the Washington National Cathedral. It was designed by Robert Pinart and fabricated by Dieter Goldkuhle, and dedicated in 1976."

But, since we ALWAYS check (right?), I went to the National Cathedral home site and found a nice video about the windows, "January 25 2022 Docent Spotlight: Sacred Stories in Light & Color."  At 26:11 you'll find this slide that confirms our finding and tells us more about the window: 

From YouTube video "Sacred Stories in Light & Color"

I tried all of the obvious AIs--none of them got it right.  Bing didn't get it, and the clue to the right answer was fairly hidden in the Google results.  This is genuinely a hard search task.  

SearchResearch Lessons 

1. Keep searching.  I had a strong suspicion that someone would have documented this kind of thing.  There are books on this topic, and if the online searches hadn't worked, I would have gotten one of them via interlibrary loan.  In this case, I found a good result AND a high-quality confirmation from the Cathedral's own site.  

2. Verify everything!  Even though we got lots of positive-sounding answers, if you check carefully, you'll see that the confident answer was, in fact, not correct. 

3. Follow those other trails.  In this case, the second result actually led us to the correct answer.  Don't give up on seemingly incorrect results... you might find something useful on the trail to your answer.  

Keep searching.