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Like most college students these days, I’m finding more and more of my research material online, compared to in books like before. In fact, some of my papers are entirely based off of webpages and web related research material. However, I’m prone to losing site that I find and quote when it comes down to citing sources.
Enter Little Snapper. This slightly expensive app, by most college student’s standards ($40), has the magical ability to capture entire webpages, without the need to do several screenshots. These archives work great for reading webpages offline if you’re traveling and have to catch up on research on the go. Also, it helps with organizing your screen grabs so you’ll never lose that important research journal or online article again.
I’ve used Little Snapper for a while now, organizing screenshots of everything from inspirational designs for my design classes to full-length articles for research classes.
A few months back I published a blog on how to use your blog as a branding tool. After publishing the same I received many mails in which the sender were looking for more tips for blogging. Yesterday I was reading the same blog and realized that I should write something about the most important criteria required for the success of the blog, i.e. the keyword research.
As I mentioned many times in the past that blogging is one of the finest and powerful marketing tools available these days. Believe me, blogging is not only considered as the marketing tools, but it is also used as a tool which can build your brand. Overall, everything starts from the posts.
One of my friend, who is the owner of a small business, planned to develop a website through which he can be able to sell the products which his company is manufacturing. I suggested him the way through which he can be able to attain more and more visitors, and that came through creating a blog. But creating a blog is not enough, you always need to manage the same too.
All set, I created a good looking e-commerce website for him, integrated the payment gateway too, and the online shopping store for him was ready. I also designed and developed a good looking blog too for him, created a few write ups too for beginning the same. Two sales within a week time was good for him too. Everything was seems perfect for him, but there was one question which was arising in the mind of my friend and it was, now what?
This is something which comes in the mind of regular bloggers too. This situation can be termed as bloggers block. Anyone can face this shortage of blog post ideas, and this can be removed with the help of the keyword research. Frankly speaking, keyword research is the backbone of the success of any blog, after all traffic is something for which every blogger is eying for, and some decent traffic can be easily achieved with the help of targeting some good keywords.
If you ask me then I can say you that for getting search engine love you need to target some good keywords and without doing the research you wont be able to decide which keywords you need to target for your blog. Here are some of the keyword tools which can help you to do the research with the keywords.
If you are also stuck with the new blog post ideas then Google Adwords keyword external tool is something which can help you out to get fresh ideas for new post. You can anytime search for any keywords and Google Adwords tool will provide you insight for the relative competition of the keyword along with how often the particular term is searched for. It also provides a few suggestions related to the same keyword.
Thus if you go by my choice then always opt for the keywords which has decent monthly search volumes, but less competition. Thus you can easily chose some keywords and prepare a list of some new titles on which you can work upon.
One of the finest tool for keyword research is Google itself. Whenever I do stuck with new blog post ideas, then I always prefer Google to suggest new ideas to me. A few days back Google started the option of Related Searches with Google search which use to give some good ideas to me, but don’t know why Google removed the same from last few days. Still, whenever I do need the new blog post ideas I use to go for Google search and search for some related keywords and it gives me lots of ideas for writing new blog post.
Although, a few years back Wordtracker was my first choice for doing the keyword reasearch, as far as Search Engine Optimization was concerned, but lately I shifted my focus towards Google Adwords External Keywords tool for doing the keyword research. But a few days back I came to know about the Keywords Questions, one of the free tool provided by the Wordtracker, and I really became a fan of the same. This tool can be found at https://freekeywords.wordtracker.com/keyword, a place where you can search for a single or short keyword and this tool will return you a list of questions which will include the same keyword and which are searched by people in search engines.
Well apart from all the above mentioned ideas for writing new blog post, I usually use Google Analytics to get keywords ideas. Normally anyone can search for such keywords which no one can be able to think about and this can be found from looking at the Analytics data, and thus you can get some fresh ideas about your new blog post.
Googler Daniel Russell knows how to find the answers to questions you can't get to with a simple Google query. In his weekly Search Research column, Russell issues a search challenge, then follows up later in the week with his solution—using whatever search technology and methodology fits the bill. This week's challenge: Are there more languages above or below the equator?
We were talking the other day about how languages came into being. You know the stories—English grew out of the Anglo-Saxon dialects with dashes of other languages (especially French and Latin) added in. The title image is one view of how languages are scattered around the world.
But then the discussion grew a bit more heated... Did languages arise because of geographic isolation, did they come about because of drift over time, or... what?
After a few glasses of wine, various complex and learned theories were bandied about, and in the end we boiled it down to one really interesting search problem that we couldn't resolve with a quick Google search:
Are there more languages ABOVE the Equator or BELOW the Equator?
A big part of answering questions like this is making your terms very clear. For this question, let's consider only Official languages (that is, languages recognized by the country) and not worry about relative sizes of speakers. We're just interested in whether or not countries below the Equator have more languages than those above the Equator.
To take an example, we know Switzerland has four "official" languages (German, French, Italian and Romansch). Romansch has been recognized as one of four "national languages" by the Swiss Federal Constitution since 1938.
So, once you figure out what the languages of all the world's countries are, and divide them into languages spoken above-equator and below-equator, you'll be set to give the answer. Notice that some languages (such as French or English) are spoken both above and below the Equator.
And for countries that straddle the Equator, let's go with the location of the capital as deciding if the country is above or below. Thus, Ecuador (capital: Quito, at 0° 9' 0? S, 78° 21' 0? W) is in the southern hemisphere.
Obviously, you don't want to do this one country or one language at a time, so the real question is... HOW will you do this?
As usual, please let us know your answer, HOW you figured it out, and HOW LONG it took for you to figure this out!
More above or below? The ideal solution will actually determine some way of measuring this directly from data available on the web.
Search on!
Wednesday Search Challenge (3/21/12): Are there more languages above or below the equator? | SearchReSearch
Daniel M. Russell studies the way people search and research—an anthropologist of search, if you will. You can read more from Russell on his SearchReSearch blog, and stay tuned for his weekly challenges (and answers) here on Lifehacker.
Googler Daniel Russell knows how to find the answers to questions you can't get to with a simple Google query. In his weekly Search Research column, Russell issues a search challenge, then follows up later in the week with his solution—using whatever search technology and methodology fits the bill. This week's challenge: Where's that cat with the Mai Tai?
I was wandering around the Bay area and came across a remarkable statue.
Even more amazingly, once I saw it, I realized that this bronze cat has a deep connection to that rum concoction known as the Mai Tai.
Given just the photos shown here, you should be able to figure out what the connection is. Can you? What possible connection can there be between this statue and a rum drink?
For extra credit, you should be able to easily determine the lat/long of the statue. Can you find an aerial image of the cat?
Googler Daniel Russell knows how to find the answers to questions you can't get to with a simple Google query. In his weekly Search Research column, Russell issues a search challenge, then follows up later in the week with his solution—using whatever search technology and methodology fits the bill. This week's challenge: Where's that cat with the Mai Tai?
Short answer: This cat is a bronze statue sculpted by Vic ("Trader Vic") Bergeron. It stands outside of McCone Hall on the UC Berkeley campus at lat/long 37.873763, -122.259545. "Trader Vic" is the inventor of the Mai Tai rum drink. (For what it's worth, that lat/long can also be written in old-school style as:
+37° 52' 25.55", -122° 15' 34.36"
And now... how to find it: Here's what I really did... Given that the picture was pretty high res, I just zoomed in and read the plaque at the bottom of the statue. Duh. But in a search challenge, every clue is fair game. Once you zoom in enough you can read it was sculpted by Vic Bergeron, which seems like a pretty obvious clue. A quick search for [Vic Bergeron Mai Tai] and you'll find many articles (including the Wikipedia entry about Trader Vic's that argue that he was at least one of the two people who claimed to have invented the Mai Tai (the other person being Donn Beach, of "Don the Beachcomber" fame).
Several readers noted that the mini-plaza around the statue seemed university-like, and that's a good clue as well. But for a question like this, I always just start by asking the simplest possible question with a query like [sabertooth cat statue bronze] and then switch into Images mode to see what I could spot there. Sure enough, I found the picture just a few rows down. From that image I learned it was at Berkeley, so a quick second source search led me to a result from Berkeley.edu, a result that is a tour of McCone Hallt — which seems pretty substantially credible. It even included the reference to the Mai Tai:
"...The saber-toothed cat, Smilodon californicus, whose likeness menaces the southern entrance to the building, is the official California State Fossil. It was sculpted by Victor Bergeron (of Trader Vic's fame) who is more widely known around the globe for his Mai Tai than for his sculptures..."
I have to admit to being surprised by a few of the answers submitted by readers. Who knew, for instance, that doing a query for [Sabre Toothed Cat, University Drive, Berkeley, CA] in Google Maps would work? Nice discovery.
Using the lat/long from above, these are the best aerial images I could find.
By the way, you CAN extract the lat/long from the link, but it's much better if you install the lat/long tool in Maps, then just right-click on any point in the map to capture the exact lat/long location.
Most people reported finding this one in less than 10 minutes. Next week, we'll go back to harder questions! Get ready!
Googler Daniel Russell knows how to find the answers to questions you can't get to with a simple Google query. In his weekly Search Research column, Russell issues a search challenge, then follows up later in the week with his solution—using whatever search technology and methodology fits the bill. This week's challenge: A simple, yet seemingly impossible puzzle.
Short answer to the challenge... The Egg of Columbus
(But read on for the rest of the story!)
This search challenge was harder than I thought… but for an interesting reason. I'll take the blame here-the question ("English 4-word idiomatic expression for something thought to be impossible, but shown to be trivial") is not exactly a cleanly defined, clearly answerable kind of question!
As a consequence, people found all KINDS of answers that I hadn't thought about.
Forest for the trees Cutting the Gordian knot Thinking outside the box Keep it simple stupid Hiding in plain sight To square the circle If it were a snake it would have bit me (so close… but too long!) Elephant in the room Needle in a haystack
And even some unusual ones:
Riddle of the Sphinx L'spirit de esclair
Alas, while many are close, they're not exactly right. "Cutting the Gordian knot" has the right sense of a sudden rapid solution to an unsolvable problem.
Thing is, I hadn't thought of that phrase as a possible solution. So kudos to those of you who made all of these suggestions. I'd put "Cutting the Gordian knot" as a correct answer, with "Forest for the trees" and "thinking outside the box" as decent half-credit answers. (They don't saying anything about the solution, just the path to the clever solution.)
As you can see, writing a nice, hard search problem that has a neat, instantly recognizable solution is tricky.
Out of the roughly 20,000 who read this problem, only 3 found the answer I planned: JacobM, Johns1111 and Amarek all found what I'd INTENDED which is such problem/solutions are called "The Egg of Columbus"—as in the sentence "That's a real 'Egg of Columbus' type problem.'
JacobM solved the problem by searching for [ seems | looks impossible ] (where the vetical bar symbol means OR). He found some idiom collections and flipped through them until finding the right one. This is a really good approach!
In the comments, Johns1111 points out that in German this would be "das Ei des Kolumbus," which is a transliteration of "The Egg of Columbus," and, in my opinion, quite correct. Congrats also to Amarek for also finding the same solution.
The Back Story to this problem: This problem was originally given to me by a friend who knew that such a phrase existed, but he couldn't think of what it was. If it makes you feel any better, I worked on-and-off on this question for about 4 weeks, trying new ways to search for it… basically looking for a way to rephrase the question so that the results would contain the answer.
After trying lots of queries (example: [ phrase simple solution hard problem ] or [ idiom for sudden answer discovery ] ) I finally tried the query: [ discovery easy "after the fact" ]
My reasoning was that someone writing about this idiom would have to use the phrase after the fact and use that phrase in the context of discovering an easy solution. That's how I chose my search terms.
Luckily, it worked out well. But truthfully, only after a lot of systematic search on my part.
The Wikipedia entry for "Egg of Columbus" has the following explanation for the phrase which I like.
The Egg of Columbus story might have begun with the Italian historian Girolamo Benzoni. In his book History of the New World (1565) he wrote: Columbus was dining with many Spanish nobles when one of them said: 'Sir Christopher, even if your lordship had not discovered the Indies, there would have been, here in Spain which is a country abundant with great men knowledgeable in cosmography and literature, one who would have started a similar adventure with the same result.' Columbus did not respond to these words but asked for a whole egg to be brought to him. He placed it on the table and said: 'My lords, I will lay a wager with any of you that you are unable to make this egg stand on its end like I will do without any kind of help or aid.' They all tried without success and when the egg returned to Columbus, he tapped it gently on the table breaking it slightly and, with this, the egg stood on its end. All those present were confounded and understood what he meant: that once the feat has been done, anyone knows how to do it.
Image of Columbus breaking the egg by William Hogarth (Wikipedia).
Whether or not the story is true, it has entered into the world as an idiomatic expression for "seemingly impossible to solve, but actually trivial." An excellent idiom.
Search lessons: (1) First, as should be obvious, finding idioms is hard. People who searched in idiom dictionaries were on to something. That's a great strategy for searching out this kind of information. I tried a couple before giving up, hoping to stumble across it (which is what happened).
(2) You sometimes have to search for the right query. I tried a lot of queries in my search (at least 100 over the 4 week period) before I found the right combination of search terms that led me to the answer. I was really interested (which is why I dedicated so much time to the problem).
My big tip about long searches is pretty simple: Keep track of what you've searched for and found. That's especially true for long search processes that take weeks. I just kept an open text file with my "search notes" in it. It really prevented me from duplicating my searches and let me systematically eliminate possibilities.
Daniel M. Russell studies the way people search and research—an anthropologist of search, if you will. You can read more from Russell on his SearchReSearch blog, and stay tuned for his weekly challenges (and answers) here on Lifehacker.
Googler Daniel Russell knows how to find the answers to questions you can't get to with a simple Google query. In his weekly Search Research column, Russell issues a search challenge, then follows up later in the week with his solution—using whatever search technology and methodology fits the bill. This week's challenge: A simple, yet seemingly impossible puzzle.