Wednesday, May 28, 2014

Wednesday Search Challenge (5/28/14): Four small challenges

This week I'd like to do something slightly different.  

As you know, my day job is to understand how people search.  Part of that is understanding what people know about what's possible to do on Google.  Can you find images?  Sure!  Can you find an image of baseball Hall of Famer Babe Ruth drinking a beer?  Um.. maybe.  What about a picture of Babe Ruth with current supermodel Kate Upton?  

A big part of search skill is knowing what's possible to do.  But a hard research problem for the field has been to try and get at that inside information.  You can't just ask someone, "Tell me everything you know about search."  

So that leads me to try this new method for estimating what people know/don't-know about their search skills.  

It's a simple 4-question survey that I'd like you to fill out.  It LOOKS long, but it's really the same 4 questions presented twice. 

The first time you see the question, it's asking you for an estimate of how long you think it will take you.  

The second time you see the question, it asks you to actually DO the Challenge and then report back on how long it took.  

First you estimate; then you actually do the task.  Both times you just enter the time (in minutes-and-seconds).  

I expect most SearchResearch Readers will be able to do this in about 5 minutes.  It's okay to take more time than that, in fact, the difference between what you estimate and what you actually take is really of interest to me.  You might estimate that something will take 3 minutes, but it actually takes 30 seconds.  Interesting.  And, vice-versa, you might guess that a task will take 30 seconds, but it actually takes 3 minutes.  Also interesting.  

Here's the survey.  Go ahead and fill it out when you've got a few minutes to work on it.  You don't need to do it all at once, you can do one pair of questions, then come back and do the next pair.  

Just be sure to hit SUBMIT before Thursday, May 29th at midnight, Hawaiian Standard Time.  (I'll need a couple of hours to look at the results and see what we've got.)  

When you're ready.... 

Click on this link to open it in a new window:  Here's the link to the survey   

Or you can just fill out the survey below.  

Thanks for your help!  Answers and feedback on Friday! 

Search on.  (And time yourself!) 

1 comment:

  1. Anne and I just finished this. Didn't take that long and it was fun!