Think you got what it takes? Can you comfortably schmoogle with Google or are you the type-and-pray sort? Prove it.
It’s 2009. If you can’t get past at least a few levels of this thing, your Internet license needs to be revoked 
(Disclaimer: I posted this a few years ago, but I wanted to see if things/times/people are different now.)
Friends and family come to me to google things for them when can’t turn anything up. Even some pretty computer-savvy people.
Shitty. What’s Nano -??? No clue.
Ipod! I don’t even own one but I got it :D. This is fun.
There’s a small, very popular fruity thing that goes by the name _ _ _ _ Nano. Several generations of 'em, in fact.
Had no idea what Google’s informal corporate motto is. Had to do an auxiliary search to get that.
Hey!
Which BBCode tag am I thinking of?
[s???r]_______[/s???r]
Tsk, tsk 
Ah, come on, it’s like the second question :p.
And here are the returned search clues for nano-ipod?
No wonder I failed. Or maybe I just don’t grasp the concept?
I gave up on the math one
Yeah. Nano[minus]ipod. If you don’t exclude the term ipod, I’m guessing it’d fill up the first page.
I do not think that piece of punctuation means what you think it means.
So, I get it now. And I’m still a shitty Googler. I had some idea that you could exclude terms but have never once used it myself. I might from now on though.
Cheers.
I didn’t, because I’m awesome and I totally solved it with my head. But my… um… friend, my friend… “Sr Seis” had no idea either. What a moron. Finally he, not me, he realized that there was only two question marks, wich means two one digit numbers. So I-- I mean, he, he just tried different combinations.
I’m stuck on the tax one with the PDF search term…
I gave up after level 4, I think.
You see that all the results are PDFs, though. How do you tell Google that the only results you’d like are those that are PDFs?
I gave up on the image search one. Really, I have no idea what could fit in those blanks.
Thing is, though, that test is really pretty useless as a measure of one’s ability to use Google.
Even if you know all of the search strategies it shows in the test questions, it still doesn’t guarantee that you’ll get the answer. In many ways, it’s more a test of internet trivia than anything else. You could sit my mother down for a year and teach her every single Google trick in the book, so that she turned into the doyen of all Google searchers, but i’ll bet she still wouldn’t know to associate the word “nano” with “iPod.”
Right, but if she did a Google search for ‘nano’, she’d see that the first few hits are about the ipod nano. So by eliminating that one, she’d get the answer.
That’s how I did it, anyway.
Often, intentionally doing a ‘wrong’ search gives you a better idea of what the right search is. I often have to wave off my boss when he gives an impossibly vague or imprecise search demand and then says “that’s not what I want!” when I aim off-target in order to narrow the criteria down.
It crashed out on 1.7 (“Can’t find server”). How many people have you got playing this!?
Nothing too hard up to there.