Solving Impossible Problems

Last week I read a blog post by John Tedesco, an Investigative Reporter for the San Antonio Express-News, sharing search tips he had learned at the 2012 Investigative Reporters and Editors conference from Daniel Russell, a Google Scientist.

This led me Dr. Russell’s own blog,  SearchReSearch (“A blog about search, search skills, teaching search, learning how to search, learning how to use Google effectively, learning how to do research. It also covers a good deal of sensemaking and information foraging.”), where I discovered a “Power searching with Google” free online class. In six 50 minute classes, “Our course is aimed at teaching you to find what you need faster, no matter how you currently use search. Do you know how to search for and read pages written in languages you’ve never even studied? Identify the location of a picture your friend took during his vacation a few months ago? How about finally identifying that green-covered book about gardening that you’ve been trying to track down for years? ”

The course starts 10 July 2012 – you  can register at this link

Back to the article I read first: It begins with this picture, and the challenge is to use Google Search to find the phone number of the office from which the picture was taken.