Patent Search Challenge

Dean Kamen

I offered a research session this week for students in a high school entrepreneurship camp called the TALENT UPgrade Experience.  As part of the two week camp, students conduct a lot of online research. For example:

• Is my business name already trademarked?
• Is my product idea, or some part of it, patented?
• How do I find the size of my market?
• Who is my competition?
• Where do I find information about how to ... (fill in the blank, from how to use PHP to add, edit and drop records from an online database, to how to solder photovoltaic cells, to how to boost the signal from a Peltier chip, etc.)

What's nice about this kind of research is that it is interest-driven. Students have personal reasons to search for and evaluate answers. 

To help make sure they know that the first two bullets are Deep Web searches, I provided some challenges.  Here's one of them you may want to try:

CHALLENGE 1: Dean Kamen

What was the title of Dean Kamen's first patent?
How old was he when he filed this patent?


Submit your answers--and how you got them--to this blog.

Students Use What They Know

When your search skills consist of Googling and Browsing, you must make the most of them.

There are other search skills, of course, but you can't use what you don't know.

Try this, for example: who is the registered owner of General Delivery University (easy)? And what is the address of the registered owner (not so easy)?

This is a Deep Web search, if you use Google as your starting point. Google can access the information, but the owner has two addresses. One is easy to find by googling. The other is easy to find using a Deep Web search (searching a different database).

This is an item I included in the current version of Information Researcher. When students give me the wrong answer, I know they've been googling. When they give me the 'right' address, I know they got it from a different database. Students find the wrong address by fact checking the copyright holder's name. Students find the address registered to the domain using something else.  Hopefully, they learn there's more to searching than Google along the way.

I leave this as a Challenge. I'll be changing the assessment item in Information Researcher soon, because the registered owner is 1) now deceased and 2) his ownership of the domain is due to expire within a year.

Medical Approval Challenge

News articles tend to introduce (incomplete) information that make good search challenges.

Here's an example from the Wichita Eagle posted on Sept. 6: Robot surgery now offered for head, neck procedures

The part of the article that ping'd my search radar was this:

"The da Vinci surgical system is now approved for use in surgeries of the head and neck."

Search for the missing information. Who approved it and when?

This search requires a keyword query, browsing, a deep web query of a specialized database and careful reading.


Post your answers in the comments: Who approved the device (I left a clue in this post) and (here's the real challenge) WHEN was approval granted? Provide an official date.

What problems do you encounter in this search?

In the News: Beatless Heart

News stories make good Search Challenges.

Public awareness and curiosity about stories in the news are good drivers for searching and evaluation. I first heard about the "beatless heart" on public radio and then yesterday a number of high profile news sites carried the story.

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/80beats/2011/06/15/researchers-create-the-first-pulseless-artificial-heart/
The first "beatless" heart experiments were done on a calf whose heart was removed and replaced with two centrifugal pumps.

Here are a few search challenges that can be spun off of the story.

1. Name the doctors who led this research (easy, except if you require the doctors' initials)

2. Find the name of the calf who received the first beatless heart (easily found in a fact-checking query)

3. How long did the calf live with her new beatless heart? (harder, requires searching the right database and skimming contents)

Of course I had to do some investigation to discover the questions and answers--but that was fun. Usually facts (or missing details) in the articles are good springboards to search questions.

Post your answers in comments.

Flight Status Challenge

My daughter is flying home to the West Coast tomorrow morning. The weather today has caused delays at the Chicago airports.

The question is: Could weather be a factor that could delay the plane before it even gets to Chicago?

It's one thing to know your flight number, it's another thing to figure out where that plane has been or where it's going after you de-plane.  My son-in-law used this information last week to avoid a delay that seemed inevitable: his plane was coming in from Albany, NY. New York was about to be hammered by winter weather. He managed to reschedule his flight for a day earlier and avoided the delays.

Challenge: If you know your flight number, how can you find information about all the legs of that flight (the cities where it stops)?  Where would you search? What keywords would you use?


Post your answers for Southwest Flight 1048, Jan. 18, 2011.

New Search Challenge: Slinky

It was bound to happen.

Someone submitted a Search Challenge question to Answers.com and finally got a correct answer. Therefore, it's time to retire old Search Challenge #6, the Apollo 8 Toy Challenge.

I'd like to introduce its replacement; Search Challenge #102, the Slinky Challenge.

If you would, please test it; see if you can solve it. It could be classified as an intermediate challenge.

I designed this challenge to require careful reading of the question, the snippets that result from queries and the content of web pages that may hold an answer.  In addition to careful reading, an optimal strategy involves "deep web" searching. One of the best places to search is the NASA site. Relying solely on Google, the query is packed with keywords. On the NASA site, a query of only two words works quite well.

Go ahead and give me your feedback, but don't include the answer, because then this blog will become another source of the answer (and one that will work with a Google search).

Mining eBay

A search this morning led me through eBay. This has happened before, so I think it's worth writing about.

Thinking that the brand name and model number would instantly fetch me the humidifier replacement filters I was looking for, I queried Google using sunbeam scm2412. Normally such a unique combination of keywords would be powerful enough to return the product and (I assumed) related parts.  That was not the case.

I did find the unit but nothing about replacement parts or filters. Expanding the query to include the words filter and replace didn't help. I ended up taking the humidifier apart to see the object I was searching for. No part number, but I could clearly see that the filter did not match the types I was finding online. Even a 'deep web' search of filter databases didn't turn it up. As far as I could determine, Sunbeam doesn't have a filter associated with the model scm2412.

The only alternative, short of picking up the phone to a supplier, was to reconsider and browse some of the sites selling the unit.  I had already browsed amazon.com, www.appliancefactoryparts.com, www.filters-now.com, shopping.yahoo.com, www.marbeck.com/humidifier_filters_sunbeam.html, www.nextag.com/sunbeam-humidifier/shop-html, www.householdappliance.com/, www.hardwareandtools.com/ and probably others without much success. I did notice that the name Jarden was often paired with Sunbeam, but I wasn't sure what to do with that.

Then there was eBay. I had exhausted the majority of the "official" distribution sites that might have proprietary information about the filter. From past experience I know that people who sell on eBay often provide their own descriptions. I found someone selling the unit and there in the description (I had to scan the page) were the words replacement filter: Jarden SW2002.

With those keywords I was able quickly to find the cheapest price online and placed an order.

It occurred to me that I had mined information from eBay before when I wasn't looking to buy something. For example, I've done research on 'beer engines' -- professional language for the equipment used to draw a pint (a fact I discovered on eBay) -- to determine how they work. I also learned a good deal about concertinas in eBay. Obviously, product-related information is going to be most prolific, so I wouldn't recommend going there to research the causes of WWI.  But if you want to find out about specific WWI hand weapons, I'm sure someone is offering that information for free.

There remains the matter about vetting the information. In my case, I fact-checked it and found the replacement filter. It's always a smart idea to see if the information found in an unvetted database can be verified or replicated.

I'm curious if you or your students have also found useful information in eBay or similar sites that you care to write about.