Searching synonyms with tilde (~)

As we saw in yesterday's post, there are a few times when an expanded synonym search is a good idea.  


Here are some examples to get you started:  


Suppose you're flying to the ORD airport (it says so on your ticket).  How might you find a place to rent a car?  


[ rent car ~ord]  -- shows synonyms for ORD (the name of the big Chicago airport).  As you can see from the results, O'Hare is a good synonym for ORD.  (I've highlighted the synonyms below.)  

This is useful when you don't know an area (e.g., around an airport code)--but also when you might not be familiar with the jargon in a specific area.  Say, back pain (again, the synonyms are highlighted): 

You might it's odd that "fracture" is a synonym, but truth is, Google figures out synonyms not semantically, but by patterns of co-use.  Thus, a synonym of Republican is Democrat (they're both used in very similar search circumstances), and "fracture" is often used in conjunction with "bone."  


You can also see the difference if we put a tilde before hound.  Compare the next two SERPs.  

The first two results are the same, but after that, the automatically generated synonyms kick in.  


When should you use the tilde operator?  Answer:  Whenever you need some suggestions about alternative ways to phrase your query.  Use tilde and discover other ways that people talk about your topic!  


Next week, suggestions and how they differ from tilde! 


Search on! 

Answer: Where is that headstone in the runway?

I'm impressed that folks were able to solve this.  It thought it would be harder than that.  


What's more, Ross Nelson found an answer *I* didn't know about!  


Here's what I did.  


After futzing around for a few searches with various combinations of [ head stone runway ] and [ headstone in runway ] I decided to try alternate queries.  My first "second attempt" was to substitute gravestone for headstone and that pretty much solved the problem
 [  gravestone in runway ] 
leads to the Wikipedia article on the Savannah/Hilton Head Airport.  


About 2/3rds of the way down in that article is the comment about the grave markers and the identification that the two markers are "...Some 3,680 feet (1,120 m) from the west end of Runway 10..."  Once I knew that, I just used  Google Maps to find runway 10, and knowing that runway 10 is 9,351 feet long, I just zoomed in about 1/3rd of the way down the runway and voila, there they were.  


Now Ross took a slightly different tack.  He went with tombstone (rather than gravestone ) and found lots of collisions with Tombstone, AZ!  He then "minused-out" the Arizona hits (by using [ tombstone -AZ -Arizona ] and discovered the Mathis, GA airfield!  His first hit was the Flickr image, but a little more digging quickly leads you to the Mathis Field web page, which confirms that they also have gravestones embedded in the runway.  (Interestingly, from almost the same time as the Savannah runway graves!)  

And regular reader Hans did something even more clever than Ross or I... he used the rarely-used tilde  ( ~ )  operator, as in the query [ ~headstone runway ] 


If you've never seen this before, I'm not surprised.  I know about it, but use it about once per year.  It means  "explore synonyms of this word"!  The reason I use it rarely is that Google already automatically checks synonyms pretty aggressively.  But as you've seen from other examples, this is one area where Google (well, all search engines) are not great.  This is an example where explicitly saying "check the synonyms" is a good tactic.  




Search lesson:  In this case, there are three big lessons... 


1.  Just 'cuz you found one solution doesn't preclude another solution!  


2. When your first search query isn't working, try reformulating.... but look for a different way to phrase the synonym (e.g., "tombstone" for "head stone," or "grave marker" for "head stone").  


3.  If you're really exploring synonyms in your query reformulations, sometimes a tilde is just the right tool.  




Search on! 

Wednesday Search Challenge (April 27, 2011): Headstone in an unusual place?

My brother is a pilot and has landed on many of the runways throughout the US.  (For the record, he flies Lear-60's.)  


He gave me a fantastic search challenge...  


Can you find the runway in the US that has a headstone emplaced in the asphalt?  Here's an image for you, although it probably won't help you much... 

So... Question:  What airport runway is this?  (Alternatively, what's the lat-long?) 


Search on! 

Answer: What's the connection between a men's shoe and John Muir?

If you lookup [ men's shoe ] you'll quickly learn that there aren't that many different types of men's shoes.  (As opposed to, say, women's shoe styles.) 


One of those common styles is called a "wingtip," so-called because the decorative pattern flares back over the shoe giving the tip of the shoe something that looks like "wings."  


Then, finding a connection John Muir is a bit less obvious.  I actually started this whole problem by wondering why wingtips have such an odd pattern.  Think about it--why are there holes in the leather of the wing? 


Wondering that led me to look for: 


[ wingtip shoe pattern history ] 


which led me to the Wikipedia entry for shoe.... and thence to the term brogue shoe (the British term for wingtip shoe).  


And of course, a "brogue" is also the heavily accented language of the Scots and Irish.  As most people know, John Muir was originally from Scotland, and never lost his accent.   (You could do the obvious search to verify that.)  


Hans, as usual, got this one first, with Tasha close behind.  


The search lesson here is that finding connections is sometimes a bit o' fun, and really an issue of traveling down different paths to find the connections, looking out for the points where traces link together.  


Which reminds me--one of the master of connection-ology is James Burke.  If this kind of tracing unlikely threads of ideas from one point to another intrigues you, you'll probably enjoy his Knowledge-Web project.  As an example, see his "Goethe to margarine" 


BTW -- Happy Birthday to John Muir, born on this day 1838 in Dunbar, Scotland.  


Ever searching!  

Wednesday Search Challenge (April 20, 2011): What's the connection?

Since the AGoogleADay puzzle is going on, I thought I might give you a slightly different challenge for today... more of a puzzle a la AGAD... one that requires (perhaps) a bit more thought than usual.  (Since I assume all you SearchResearch readers can do the AGAD puzzle without too much difficulty!).  


So.. here's a fun, multi-step, chaining kind of problem for you.  Let me know if this was too simple for you (or too difficult)!  


     What's the connection between a male shoe style and the accent of John Muir? 

  


Can you figure out the most logical (and shortest) path between them?  


Search on! 

Clever trick to make YouTube videos fill up the browser

A great tip for people creating web-based instruction... 

If you're teaching with YouTube videos, you know the problem.  The student clicks on a YT link and see LOTS of stuff on the right-hand side or in the comments below the video.  

While those contents are important if you're browsing video, in a classroom setting, it's often distracting and takes students off-task.  The normal landing-page to a YouTube video looks like this: 

Great to browse, but a bit distracting when you're trying to learn something.  

So... how can you force the video to fill the browser and NOT show all the distracting 

If  the original YouTube video is located at ..

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BNHR6IQJGZs  (This is the Matt Cutts video on “How search works”)

You can modify the URL to include the modified argument “watch_popup”  (as below)

http://www.youtube.com/watch_popup?v=BNHR6IQJGZs

And the YT video will fill the browser.   Nice technique to use when creating links on educational materials to YouTube videos!   

Always searching for ways to improve your (and your students') productivity! 

Is it just trivia? Thinking about learning in AGoogleADay

A few people have asked me if the AGoogleADay.com project is really just a clever way of getting people to search more effectively or if we have some other more subtle goal here. 


The truth is...  We really just want to teach people how to search more effectively.  That's a big goal in-and-of-itself.  As Ken Denmead writes in his GeekDad blog on WIRED: "Over time, Google has realized that people aren’t using Google to its full potential. Like taking your Lamborghini Miura to the corner store to pick up a lottery ticket, folks haven’t been truly putting the search engine through its paces..."  


You've heard me say that before (although not quite as vividly as Denmead).  


The nuance of AGoogleADay is to teach a subtle through a fun activity that encourages play and exploration.  And although we're not giving explicit instructions, I suspect that people who try to solve the puzzle, then read the answer and understand it, will be picking up a good deal of strategic search insight.  


This past week we've presented a number of problems that all turn on three skills that aren't explicitly mentioned, but picked up through trying to solve the problem.  The skills are: 


1.  Query term selection, as you saw the Rohan and Robert problem ("My name is Robert. One day before my brother Rohan’s 19th birthday, our father had an album on the Billboard 200. Name the album.")  You come to understand that you don't type the problem as presented, but extract the most salient terms for the initial query.  Thus, [ Rohan Robert brothers ] is a great starting query.  (Whereas [ my name is Robert.  One day before... ] is not.)  


2.  Chaining steps together.  Solving the two future presidents problem ("Two future presidents signed me. Two didn't because they were abroad. Despite my importance, modern viewers seem to think I have a glaring spelling error. What is it?") requires first figuring out what the document was that two future presidents signed AND two future presidents did not (who were also alive at the same time).  Once you know that, you can search for [ Constitution misspellings ] and come to know that what once passed for plausible spelling (that is, "Pensylvania").  Interesting side-note:  the state is also spelled with a single N on the Liberty Bell, but spelled with two Ns in Article 1, Section 2 of the Constitution.  Spelling was more variable in the late 18th century.  


3.  Reading carefully.  In the ferry-to-Iceland problem, ("If you were a ferry passenger traveling from Continental Europe to the country with twice as many sheep as people, in what town would you most likely dock?")  many people assumed they knew that the answer was New Zealand and did a query [ ferry Europe to New Zealand ].  But if you think about it for a second, that's a long ferry ride.  People who did this query just answered the question without reading the search results carefully.... this is the most common problem among people who are using Google to answer questions.  Trust me, there IS no regularly scheduled ferry service from Europe to New Zealand (not in any normal sense of the word "ferry").  




How'd you do this past week?  Get them all?  Miss them all? 
Let me know!  


Still searching! 

Answer: Extension of aGoogleADay problem from this week

The problem was pretty simple:  


     What's the name of the telecommunications museum in Seyðisfjörður?  


The only way I could solve this problem was to use the "Translated foreign pages" tool in the Left Hand Panel.  


To get there, you have to click on "More Search Tools" -- then use the "Translated Foreign Pages" tool to search for: 
[ Seyðisfjörður museum ] 


This will result in a lots of pages in Icelandic which will then be translated to English (or whatever your host language is).  The translation isn't perfect, but the results are easily good enough to look for "museum" in the SERP and find the link to the city's web site (.visitseydisfjordur.com, which is, oddly enough NOT in the .IS top-level domain!)  


There you'll quickly see that the museum is actually called the "Technical Museum of the East," or Tækniminjasafn Austurlands in Icelandic.  


Funny thing though, while the translation works generally pretty well--but it can't quite decipher some of the text.  The translated guess is as follows:   
      The collection area is the oldest ritsímastöð country, 
      the country's oldest vélsmiðja and very noteworthy 
      bryggjuhús from 1881 to 1897.

It's not intentionally funny, but it reads like a joke--you can understand everything except the nouns... 


Still, from what I could gather by doing Image searches, a bryggjuhús is a small house next to the water; a vélsmiðja is a kind of shop; and I have no idea what a ritsímastöð is... maybe a section of the country?  


(Any Icelandic speakers out there want to fill us in?) 


Still searching! 

Wednesday Search Challenge (April 13, 2011): Extensions of the aGoogleADay

(This was supposed to go out yesterday!  Sorry about the delay.   It's been busy here.) 

Since I'm heavily involved in the AGoogleAday.com project, I feel a bit odd ALSO posting a weekly Wednesday search challenge here.  

I thought about it for a while and realized that what I CAN do is to offer a bit of an extension to the puzzle on Wednesdays. 

As you know, today's puzzle on AGAD is: 

     If you were a ferry passenger traveling from Continental Europe 

     to the country with twice as many sheep as people, in what town 

     would you most likely dock?

And, you probably know the answer by now.  (And if you don't, you can go to the site and click on the green "Show answer" button.  Here's an extension to today's AGAD puzzle.  

Even though it's a fairly small town, the What is the name of the telecommunications museum in    AGoogleADay.com puzzle??  

Search on! 

AGoogleADay -- after the first day

The site for AGoogleADay went live yesterday and judging from the number of Tweets and posts we've seen, it's been a pretty good success.  


How did you do on the two presidents problem?  Remember the question was: 


     Two future presidents signed me.  Two didn't because they were abroad.  
     Despite my importance, modern viewers seem to think I have a glaring 
     spelling error.  What is it? 


The answer: 


     Searching [two presidents signed two did not] yields the U.S. Constitution. 
     Searching [constitution misspellings] reveals that "Pennsylvania" was spelled 
     with only one "n."

Several people wrote to ask "how can you know who the future presidents are?"  Excellent question.  Google doesn't have prognostic powers.  But the Constitution was signed on September 17, 1787, but George Washington became the first president in 1789.  Both he and James Madison were, at the time of the signing, presidents-yet-to-be.  

Two other future presidents who were alive in 1789 and could have potentially signed the Constitution were Thomas Jefferson, who was in France, and John Adams, who was in Great Britain in September of 1787.  

And of course you know that John Hancock signed the Constitution twice.  


But the interesting bit, from our SearchResearch perspective is how you solved the problem.  


In general, a long query like [ two presidents signed two did not ] isn't recommended because it tends to exclude parts of the results that you really want to see.  


HOWEVER... a long query is sometimes called for, especially when you're trying to find a combination concept (concept 1: "two presidents signed"  concept 2: "two did not").  In these cases, a longer query is probably required.  You really want results that contain both concepts, and trying to intersect results is just too hard to do.  Thus, longer queries really are called for.. on occasion.  


Advice:  Puzzles like the ones we're running on AGAD sometimes require skills you don't have... or violating the "normal" guidelines of search.  This is one such case.  (Others will appear in future puzzles.)  


Search on!