Have You Played A Google a Day Yet?

A Google a Day gameEvery Thursday, I will republish my best articles from Technorati.com. Since Technorati redesigned its website and is under new managements, tens of thousands of articles that were previously published on the site are no longer available. I have been given explicit permission to republish my work on my own website. Think you'd be a master at trivia if you could just use Google to find the answers? Well, now's your chance to prove it.

A Google a Day is a new trivia game where you use Google, and only Google, to find the answers to the questions. Launched over the holiday weekend, it's a twist on typical trivia games, where using the Internet is considered cheating. You can play a basic game that only has three questions, or with a Google+ account, you can play a longer game with 10 questions. As the name states, you can only play it once per day.

The game has questions in six categories: pop culture, history, arts and literature, geography, science, and sports. The categories are random each day, so you could play a game that doesn't have any geography questions, or has four science questions. Points are earned based on how difficult the question is, how long it takes you to find the answers, as well as if you use any power ups (double points, additional time etc.). You have unlimited tries to answer a question correctly, and you can skip a question if it's too hard. However, to unlock the next level of questions, you have to answer two out of the three of them correctly, so you can really only skip one question per level.

If you thought search would make trivia that much easier, you would be sorrily mistaken. As the questions get harder, you often have to do multiple searches based on how the question is phrased. For example, you might have to first search for the name of Gwyneth Paltrow's husband, and then find out the name of the album for which his band won a 2004 Grammy Award. Tricky stuff, although each question comes with one hint and one clue (the clue is more specific than the hint), of which clicking them will add time and take away points. The game also has a "Tips & Tricks" page, which offers advice on how to search Google better. The advice is good for both the game and in real life.