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: Who's the artist?

I was sorting through some photos I happen to take a while ago and it happened again. I found this extraordinary picture of a mural. It's one that I really like, but I can't figure out where or when or who or what it's all about. Arrgh!

As often happens with memories (and this is key in many difficult search tasks), I DO recall a couple of odd associated facts:

• This picture was taken somewhere in the south
• Near where this photo was taken, I remember a high school that had an interesting cultural mix. In particular, there were two languages spoken at this school (one was English).

Can you help me out? The challenges here range from the simple to the complex.

1. Where was this photograph taken (I'm looking for the street address or at least the nearest intersection.)?
2. Who's the artist?
3. What two languages are spoken in the nearby high school?

Search on!

Wednesday Search Challenge (5/23/12): Who's the Artist? | 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 on earth?

The short answer: This photo was taken in March, 2004. (I know, since I took the picture.) It was shot at the Matei airport on Taveuni, Fiji. The runway there is 910m long (2,986 feet).

How to solve this challenge: In this case, all you know is that it's somewhere with palm trees (given that it's me taking the picture, probably somewhere in the tropics), and that the plane has a tail registration number.

If you do a simple quoted search [ "DQ-TRI" ] you'll quickly find that this is a plane that was in the service of Air Fiji: Info about the plane. It's a Pilatus Britten-Norman Trislander registered to Air Fiji. (Why use the quotes? Because without them you end up with far too many off-topics hits. DQ and TRI both have multiple meanings. But together in a phrase... they can only mean one thing.)

You'll find that all planes have tail numbers that identify who they're registered to—who owns them, etc.. If you read a bit more, about the plane, you can discover all kinds of amazing information out on the open web—who made it, who bought it, where it was sold (and re-sold). For the history of this particular plane, see TheFreeLibrary.com

To get the rest of the story, you can check the Wikipedia page for Air Fiji tells the story. The company started in 1967, but foundered in 2009, selling off all 5 planes in its fleet.

But for our purposes, the first photo on the Wikipedia page is a photo of a plane in a nearly identical location (by Herman Luyken).

The interesting bit here is that the plane in the photo I took is in almost exactly the same spot as the Wikipedia photo. This lets us verify that it's really the same South Pacific airport (and not some other random airport in the tropics).

If you look on the Wikipedia page, for the Matei airport on Taveuni, Fiji, you'll find it's at 16°41′26″S 179°52′37″W, and the runway is 910m or 2,986ft.

Now, how to determine the date?

The folks who looked for a picture by me from a possible trip to Fiji did the right thing. It was a good idea, and it's the first thing I would have done. Except I didn't put anything out onto the web about that trip.

And the people who looked for the metadata associated with the image (also called the EXIF data-see the Wikipedia article on EXIF) also had a good idea. Except I stripped out the EXIF data, just because I knew you'd be looking. You have to be a little careful about the EXIF since it can be altered on purpose (or just by accident when the image is edited).

So how to get a decent date range? You also know that Air Fiji when out of business in 2009 and the plane was purchased in 2002, so it has to be between those dates.

But if you compare the pictures side-by-side:

...you can see that the background foliage is very, very, VERY similar. All of the trees are the same height, even the grass is pretty much the same between the two pictures.

Then, if you do an image search for [ Matei Taveuni airport ] you can find other images from other dates (I could find ones from 2008 and 2004 easily) that let me see what kind of background foliage change had happened during that time. If you look closely, you can see not only that some of the plants had changed, but also the fence posts around the runway as well.

So while this isn't an exact measure, you can be pretty confident that this picture was taken sometime in 2004. (And I'll tell you, it was taken on March 17th, 2 weeks after the Wikipedia picture was shot!)

In a more normal case, the EXIF data probably would have given you precisely the date.

SEARCH LESSONS:

1. Once again, using whatever small amount of text you have in an image can often lead you to the kind of repositories you need... in this case, all of the accumulated information about plane registrations.
2. Sometimes you have to look for the forest AND the trees, and by comparing information you get from multiple sources (e.g., pictures from 2008 or information about when Air Fiji bought that particular plane), you can get a pretty good boundary on the possible dates.

Search on!

Wednesday Search Challenge (May 16, 2012) Answer: Where on Earth? | 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.

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 on Earth?

I'm back from my travels, but I'm still in a vacation kind of mind-set. So today I've got a slightly more difficult problem for you.

Above is a picture I took on a trip a few years ago. Although it seems crazy hard (bordering on impossible), by working just with the information in this picture, can you:

1. Figure out how long the runway is?

And, once you've figured that out:

2. What's the lat/long for this airport?

You'll have to think like a detective to figure this one out.

As usual, be sure to tell us how long it took you to figure this one out, and HOW you solved the search challenge. (And if you're still looking for a challenge, what year was this photo taken?)

Search on!

Wednesday Search Challenge (5/16/12): Difficult—Where on Earth...? | 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.

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: Bats over Austin—where do they go?

In yesterday's challenge I asked a few questions about bats in Austin, TX. How did you do in answering them? Here's what I did.

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1. What kind of bats are we seeing (at the Congress Avenue bridge)?

This is a pretty easy question. A quick Google search for [bats Congress bridge Austin] will quickly get you to some pages that describe the bats as "Mexican free-tailed bats." If you then dig just one query deeper, say [Mexican free-tailed bat] you'll learn from multiple sources that these are small bats that are known by the scientific name of Tadarida brasiliensis, also known as the Brazilian free-tailed bat. The Congress Avenue bridge is home to a colony of around 1.5 million bats (at the mid-season peak population).

So the answer: Mexican free-tailed bats, aka Brazilian free-tailed bats, aka Tadarida brasiliensis.

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2. What kind of bat is the most common in Texas?

This is slightly more difficult because there are so many kinds of bats in Texas, and because the Austin population is so well-known and popular, you can imagine that some folks will immediately claim that they're the most populous bat in the state.

So a search like [most common bat Texas] gets to a bunch of resources, including pages about "most common bats in the US" (be careful to NOT read this as the most common bat in Texas!).

But there are also a few pages from the Texas Parks and Wildlife department that assert that the Mexican Free-tailed bat is the most common. That's good, but can we find a biologist who can give population statistics?

One way to do this is to search for the scientific name of the bat (Tadarida brasiliensis) at EDU sites. For instance, the search [site:.EDU Tadarida brasiliensis Texas population] leads us to web pages as universities such as Texas Tech's Natural Science Research Laboratory.
In their description of the "Brazilian Free-tailed bat" (notice that they don't call it the Mexican free-tailed bat), they note: "...bats that inhabit Texas caves during the summer have been estimated at 95-104 million. The largest of the caves, Bracken Cave near San Antonio, is thought to hold between 20 and 40 million bats." So while the population in Austin is big, it's nowhere near the biggest colony in the state!

But a little looking around comparing different species of bats shows that the Mexican free-tailed (aka Brazilian) bat is clearly the most common bat in Texas.

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3. When these bats migrate, where do they go (we know they go somewhere south into Mexico, but can you tell me which states they visit for the winter?)?

This is a bit trickier-we're trying to figure out the names of places in southern Mexico and Central America. But it's a little hard to search for something when you don't know what it is!

This is the kind of question I'd use Google Scholar to answer. It seems like the kind of research a bat biologist would do. A quick Google Scholar search for [Tadarida brasiliensis migration wintering] led me to: "Seasonal movements of Mexican freetail bats Tadaridabrasiliensis Mexicana banded in the Great Plains" by Bryan P. Glass, Southwestern Naturalist 27(2):127-133 (May, 1982)

Even though this is a partial document for the longer paper, you can still read enough to find out that different bat populations move to different places for the winter. But the short answer is that some go to Sinaloa, Sonora, and Michoacan.

Digging just one-result deeper confirms this finding, as this map (Figure 1 from the paper "Genetic variation and migration in theMexican free-tailed bat (Tadarida brasiliensis mexicana)" by A.L. Russell (no relation to me), et al. in the journal Molecular Ecology 14, 2207-2222 (2005) illustrates, the bats pretty clearly end up in central Mexico.

Keep searching!

Wednesday Search Challenge (5/9/12): Bats Over Austin—Where Do They Go? | 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.

Title image remixed from Nazzu (Shutterstock).