Wednesday, April 14, 2010

Wednesday Search Challenge (April 14, 2010): a tough song to find

A friend asked me a hard question the other day that is today's Search Challenge.   

     What's the name of the jazz standard song, recorded by
     Billie Holiday, Frank Sinatra, and others, that includes the lyric 
     "It was just one of those things", but is NOT Cole Porter's 
     tune "Just one of Those Things"?



Give this a try!  Write down your starting time (hh:mm:ss) and then work on it.  See how long it takes you to solve this little puzzle.  Post a comment with your time and how you managed to solve it.  




Masterful performance:  less-than 15 seconds 
Good job:  15 seconds - 1 minute 
Okay job:  1 minute - 2 minutes 
Need to read SearchResearch blog more often:  > 2 minutes 


My answer tomorrow.  


Search on! 

Posted by Dan Russell at 8:49 PM

4 comments:

  1. 1:30; I started with "just one of those things" lyrics; that gave me the lyrics of the Cole Porter song, so then I added -crazy and that took me to the right song. Shouldn't have taken as long as it did, but I detoured with a -Porter before the -crazy, and that just cost time.

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  2. David -- That's a good point. How many "detours" do searchers take while on-the-way to a final outcome? And, are all of those necessarily bad? It's unclear to me since serendipity is one of those characteristics that people seem to enjoy about web search. If we give them pure efficiency, will we have taken the joy out of scholarship? Will we have removed the juice from search?

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  3. Dan, that's a great question! And I think the answer is the canonical one: "it depends".

    When I'm "on a roll" and searching for a particular fact (or word) to support what I'm doing, detours are probably bad (and I often don't go beyond the snippet on the SERP page). But when I'm gathering a broader array of information to give me material to think about, detours are essential.

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