Monday, June 26, 2006

Take the Google Challenge

So a friend and I were in a bookstore, and we found ourselves in the photography section, looking for a famous photograph she remembered - a famous photograph that, for some reason, we couldn't find in any of their books. (Blame Barnes & Noble.) "But of course," we told each other, "we can find it on the Internet." So, when we got to a computer, we looked for it...

And... well, we found it. But, to our surprise, it was actually very difficult to find. So here's what I want to know: is my pride in my Internet searching prowess badly misplaced, or was it really as hard as all that?

Yes, it's a contest. Anyone can enter - anyone who would like to satisfy my curiosity, and who has some time to kill, dead, with a stake through its heart. You're on your honor, but if you can do it in under thirty minutes, I for one will not consider your honor tarnished. I'll give you the same information (from my friend's memory) that we had when we started our search:

We were looking for a famous Life Magazine picture from the 50s, of a woman who had committed suicide by jumping off the Empire State Building. She had landed on a car, smashing it, of course. Possibly because the photo was in black and white, there was no visible blood, and she actually looked quite peaceful, as if she were sleeping... on a crumpled car.

That's it. I'll post results, impressions, gratuitous insults if any, and, eventually, a link to the answer. (My answer, that is.) Ready?

Begin.

5 Comments:

At 7:38 PM, Blogger divine angst said...

Did it. Found it in about three minutes. Do you want me to put the search term that led to the result?

 
At 7:53 PM, Blogger Filch said...

Tell me! I wasted lots of time paging through "Life Magazine" reprint sites. Teach me to put any faith at all commercial results.

 
At 8:07 PM, Blogger divine angst said...

"picture empire state building suicide crumpled car"

 
At 8:08 PM, Blogger divine angst said...

I should note that it wasn't my first search string, though--I played around with some variations. I tried a Google Images search, but that was worthless. So I put "picture" first in the string, figuring I'd get better results that way.

 
At 8:17 PM, Blogger Filch said...

Wow - a direct hit! I am impressed. I actually got so disgusted with Google Image Search, and Google in general, that I dropped out and went to clusty.com, where I found it very quickly, under a "cluster" called "famous photos." I can't offhand remember the search terms I used but I seem to recall that by then I had a precise fix on the date, so I think I used "1947" as a term.

 

Post a Comment

<< Home