Google a Day trivia game tests your research skills

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Cheating is encouraged in Google’s daily trivia game.

A Google a Day is the tech giant’s daily puzzle designed to test your Googling skills. A new question is posed every day on the website a googleaday.com and printed weekdays in the New York Times above the crossword puzzle.

Judging by a quick scan of last week’s questions, no topic is off limits to the Google trivia masters, with queries jumping from biology to American history to chemistry to obscure factoids about salmon subspecies. Thursday’s stumper, which can be viewed and answered here, comes from Time magazine columnist Fareed Zakaria:

‘I am the 19th century founder of the country that now has the world’s largest Ferris wheel. In what year was I born?’

Or the question from June 19:

‘Named for the Roman god of fire, this process turns tree sap into a valuable industrial material. What is the atomic number of the additive used in this process?’

Hat’s off to readers who know off the top of their heads.

And for those (sort of) trivia purists who turn up their nose at the idea of getting spoilers from other participants, the tech company cooked up a special version of the Google search engine called Deja Google -- a ‘wormhole inspired time machine that enables you to solve today’s puzzle spoiler free by searching the Internet’ without updates and clues from other folks posting answers to the puzzle online.

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--Shan Li