HELP

[jedusor]

If anyone can figure out a way to search Google for (or simply produce the title of) a well-known or influential book that is not Catcher in the Rye or Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince and was published on July 16th of any year, I will love you forever. The sooner the better.

Comments

[mh75.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure, but, Librarians kick a suprising amount of ass, and may be able to search a database according to publication date. Worth checking.

[jedusor.livejournal.com]

I got on this AskNow chat thing that put me in touch with one, but s/he couldn't find it right off the bat and asked to e-mail me later this afternoon. Hopefully, they'll come up with something.

[therobbergirl.livejournal.com]

Do you specifically need to use Google? If not, I don't think Google's your best bet. You can run the following search to eliminate Catcher and Potter:

book "july 16" -"catcher in the rye" -"harry potter"
(You can also run it with 16 and july reversed to make sure that you're examining both U.S. sites and non-U.S. sites.)

But as you can see when you run it, it doesn't yield any links that are obviously about well-known or influential books published on July 16 of any year.

The problem is that the specific publication date is irrelevant to most discussions of a book. When people provide the date in their discussions, they do so as just another administrative detail about the book to help others find the book. They don't do it as a major point in their discussions.

That leaves runaway hits like Harry Potter to come up high in Google searches associated with a specific date. It was a widely anticipated book and so lots of people had that date marked on their calendars.

A friend of mine (and of palecur and shoutingboy) is lara7. She's a librarian and loves it when people think of the library rather than the net. If you drop her a line, she might be able to help you.

[noodlboy.livejournal.com]

Are you certain it's a book and not some other form of publication? I'm finding a number of significant events which I'm sure were quite newsworthy that occurred on July 16th. Could it, perhaps, be a bit of a trick question?

[jedusor.livejournal.com]

It's not actually a test question. I need to find three events that happened on a specific date (it's supposed to be my birthday, but she said it didn't have to be exact) for a speech, and the three events have to be related. I saw on Wikipedia that Harry Potter 6 and Catcher in the Rye were published on the same day, and it would be awesome to do a speech on books. I may need to find a new topic, though, because I'm having very little luck in my quest, despite contacting a librarian directly. There's gotta be some other famous book published on that day, right? *sigh*

[noodlboy.livejournal.com]

Hmm. Not seeing much. You can find a lot of stuff by plugging dates in at wikipedia.com. For instance: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/July_16

Also, http://www.brainyhistory.com/days/july_16.html and http://www.440.com/twtd/archives/jul16.html

There are probably others. I poked around and am just not finding anything else of note that was published on that date.

[dacrons-lair.livejournal.com]

Sorry hun. You're outta luck.

-M

hope this helps

[1firefly.livejournal.com]

enter
"publication date: july 16" -harry -potter