New York — As geeks, we all are fans of puzzles, and are proud to be great at search! Google is looking to entertain users by teaming up with the New York Times to put out a daily brain teaser. And that is precisely the premise of A Google a Day, a new crossword puzzle that encourages players to use the search engine in pursuit of the answers.
As the customary law of crossword puzzles describes that you may not seek help from the Internet, but such behavior is actually encouraged in a new game from Google and the New York Times. They want people to learn how to search. But beware: they have a deeper motive than just sating all the polymaths out there.
The search engine giant on Tuesday debuted a daily puzzle that it has dubbed A Google a Day, in the print edition of the New York Times, right above the crossword puzzle.
It puts forward a single trivia question per day, getting progressively harder throughout the week, and points users to agoogleaday.com to search for answers. And since the daily puzzle posed by Google, doing a search for the answer is not considered cheating.
Tuesday’s question, for example, is: “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?”
Thus, for the next four months or so, there will be a new puzzle posted each weekday to agoogleaday.com. The Monday puzzles will be relatively straightforward. Tuesday’s will be harder, Wednesday’s even harder, and so on. The puzzles get more challenging each day of the week, not unlike the New York Times Crossword.
These questions require a bit of logic in addition to a finely-tuned search query. Here’s the question for today: “This is a close-up photo of the heaviest boneless animal. What gives the skin its slightly yellowish tinge?”
The kicker about each puzzle is that not only is it a cool challenge to solve, it will also plumb the depths of your higher-level Google skills. And therein lies the secret motive. Clicking “show answer” on the A Google a Day Website also shows the best search queries for finding the answer.
“Just like age-old crossword puzzles, the difficulty of the questions increases over the course of the week, so by Thursday or Friday, even the most seasoned searcher may be stumped,” wrote Dan Russell, Google’s user experience researcher, in a blog post.
According to Newsgrange, the puzzle game will function as a promotion for Google search, while also educating users on how to form effective queries and use other search tools available from Google, such as Images and News.
“As the world of information continues to balloon, we believe A Google a Day triggers your imagination and helps you discover all the types of questions you can ask Google — and get an answer,” Russell added.
Moreover, savvy googlers amongst you may worry that, if you go googling to try and solve one of the puzzles, you will likely find the answer to the puzzle, posted by someone else somewhere else on the internet, in your search results.
Well, hold your breath! Google has thought of that too — To ward-off game spoilers, Google says look for answers on the newly created site rather than the regular search engine. This special version of Google excludes real-time updates and other aids to solving the puzzle. A rare case when censorship is a good thing?