We’ve got a corporate quiz happening in November - last year, there was a lot of cheating with people (brazenly, in some cases) googling the answers on their smartphones (despite this being forbidden).
Anyway, I thought it would be interesting if a couple of decoy questions could be introduced - where Google gives a first answer that is:
[ul]
[li]Distinctive (maybe even worded in a distinctive way, so we can be confident it was googled, rather than just remembered)[/li][li]Obscure or esoteric (i.e. not something someone would be likely to know already)[/li][li]Wrong[/li][/ul]
This thread*addressed the same issue a while back. You (!) suggested Snopes as a target site, but the problem is that some people will be wrong because they remembered the urban legend rather than because they googled it.
Is there going to be a penalty for getting the wrong answers on these questions? If it were to cost, say 10% of total available points then this will be a powerful deterrent - if it’s just one missed point, less so.
(One solution might be just to bluff - tell people ahead of time that there are booby-trap questions, even if you can’t find any. This will work if you also announce a big penalty, I should think.)
*Yes, I found it by googling for “google wrong answers”. You can’t fight the system.
I’m not saying you should do this, or even that it would definitely work, but I’m just saying that if the clear top google result for a question is a particular wikipedia entry, and if someone went in to wikipedia and edited (falsely) the entry a few minutes before the quiz, then the false entry would probably still be there during the quiz to catch cheating contestants.
Actually it almost certainly wouldn’t. Unless you are very good at wikipedia vandalism or attack a very obscure subject your misleading edits would be reverted very rapidly. Also you need to rely on google re-indexing it.
Keep in mind that anything obscure but specific mentioned in this thread will likely come up as a top search result in Google, possibly revealing the entrapment ploy.
I go to a regular pub quiz on Friday nights that cuts down on smartphone cheating with the simple tactic of reading the questions quickly. I.e., there are seven rounds. Each round has 10 questions. The quizmaster reads each question and gives no more than about 10 seconds for teams to write down the answer before he goes to the next one. Once he reads the last question, you only have about half a minute before he requests all papers to be turned in, and then you start again for round 2. There is also a picture round, as someone described earlier, and an “identify this song” round.
You can still cheat with a smartphone, but it’s a lot harder because while you’re trying to look up the answer to #1, he’s already reading #2, etc.
If people are brazenly cheating, you need to have an arbitrator who goes around and confiscates smartphones from people. Either that or dock people a 5-point fine every time you see a smartphone on the table or in someone’s hands. Cheaters suck.
I believe cartographers used to (still?) do something like this.
They’d fabricate a village with an obscure name and throw it on a map. If the village later appeared on maps from other map makers, next thing they knew, Blam!, the culprit would find themself standing in front of Judge Judy.
I’ve tried a couple of misconceptions that I’ve heard commonly (or once believed):
Elephants are the only animal with 4 knees
Thomas Edison invented the lightbulb
Logie Baird invented television
Golf was invented in Scotland
and in each case Google offered several cites with the common wrong answer but at least one throwing doubt on it. I guess it depends if people are going to go straight for the top answer - you could encourage this by controlling the time they have, as per MsWhatsit, but it’s not certain.
Set up a website which turns up when you search for that phrase.
Ask the question, “Which famous 17th century eccentric said… [phrase]?”
When people get to that website, they find that you have encoded a loud, autoplaying siren noise. Instant disqualification and public shaming for anybody you hear looking at the website.
So I have nothing useful to add, but still want to say that I love this idea. As a (not particularly good) bar trivia player and hater of cheats, I’m on board with this. Also, I like the photo suggestion. It might not be exactly what you’re looking for, but it’s pretty cheat proof, which is good enough. It doesn’t out and shame the frauds, sure, but take what you can get.