The three Rs (Reading, wRiting and aRithmetic) were the education basics of generations past, but maybe now we should add a fourth, information Retrieval. We all turn to Web search engines like Bing and Google whenever we need to know something and the technology has revolutionized how we access and even think about information. But how adept are you at using modern search engines?

Google introduced A Google a Day as a daily puzzle to help you improve your search skills.

"A Google a Day is a new daily puzzle that can be solved using your creativity and clever search skills on Google. Questions will be posted every day on agoogleaday.com and printed on weekdays above the New York Times crossword puzzle. We’ll reveal each puzzle’s answer the next day in the Times and on agoogleaday.com, along with the search tips and features used to find it.

Just like traditional 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." (source)

Here's today's question:

With many people playing, you would expect to find lots of spoilers online as people comment on the daily puzzle on Twitter, Facebook or their blogs. To prevent this, Google's A Google a Day site uses a special interface that "excludes real-time updates and other things that are likely to include spoilers as people post the answers to the puzzle online."

Google is not the first company to think of using Web search games for marketing. Microsoft introduced Club Bing in 2007 to promote its new Bing search engine and now hosts a number of Web search related games on its site.

“I was delighted and honored to be selected as one of the Senior Members who were named in the first year of the Senior Member Program,” says Dr. Marie desJardins, who was recently granted Senior Member Status by the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI). Senior Members, of which there are a maximum of only twenty-five chosen per year, are selected according to their contributions in the field of artificial intelligence, active involvement with AAAI, and endorsements from AAAI Fellows. 

“The mission of AAAI is to serve as a professional organization for the advancement of artificial intelligence techniques,” explains desJardins, who has been an AAAI member since 1987, when she was a graduate student at the University of California: Berkeley. Since then, desJardins has served the organization in a variety of roles including as an AAAI Councillor (2001-2004), AAAI Symposium Associate Chair (2002-2006), and the AAAI Workshop Program Co-Chair (1999-2000), among others. Most recently, she has served on the editorial board of AI Magazine, a quarterly publication of AAAI that features articles highlighting new AI-related research.

In addition, Dr. desJardins has served as chair, co-chair, mentor and/or reviewer of the AAAI Doctoral Consortium every year since 2000. She was a founding member and co-organizer of the AAAI Teaching Forum, now known as the Annual Symposium on Educational Advances in Artificial Intelligence (EAAI). EEAI was established to provide a forum for educators and researchers to discuss teaching techniques that better communicate the principles of AI. This year, Dr. desJardins sent three undergraduate students and one Ph.D. student to the symposium in San Francisco to present a poster entitled "Playing to Program: An Intelligent Programming Tutor for RUR-PLE.”