Query Quest

Each quest is 5 riddles drawn from 35, all about Velantria, an invented world described in a small encyclopedia of 28 articles. Type a search, read the matching articles (their titles, text and keyword tags), then type the answer in a few words. Every riddle has a par, 2 or 3 searches, and a quest's par is the total of its five.

Every search counts, and so do a hint and a wrong answer. You must search at least once for a riddle before you can answer it, and an answer must be one answer: a reply of more than 8 words, or one that also names another riddle's answer, counts as wrong. If you are stuck, Give up shows the answer and the article it came from and moves on, but that riddle scores nothing.

• Plain words find articles that use them, in the title, the keywords or the text; common words such as "the" and "of" are ignored.
• "a phrase" in quotes finds only articles with that exact phrase.
• -word leaves out every article that uses the word.
• intitle:word finds only articles with the word in the title; keyword:word finds only articles tagged with it.
• Words are matched on their stem, so crabs finds crab and notches finds notch.
• Score: 1,000 points for each riddle solved, plus 75 for every search under par (minus 75 for every search over).

One riddle asks: at the festival that is NOT held in autumn, what do the children race to catch before midnight? Its par is 3. Searching festival returns 5 articles, with both festivals tied at the top. Searching festival -autumn leaves out the Festival of Falling Lanterns and puts The Festival of First Frost first, whose last sentence has the children racing to catch the last falling leaves. Type leaves and the riddle is solved in 2 searches, 1 under par.

A quest's par is between 10 and 14. Solve all five riddles with 9 searches against a par of 11 and you score 5,000 + 2 × 75 = 5,150. Give up on one par-2 riddle instead and par drops to 9: the same 9 searches score 4,000.

• Daily: the same five riddles for everyone each day (the day changes at midnight UTC). Only your first Daily of the day counts on the leaderboard; it counts as played from your first search, hint or answer.
• Practice: a fresh random quest every time.
• Daily and Practice each have their own leaderboard.

• Desktop: type a search and press Enter or click Search; type an answer and press Enter or click Answer. Hint and Give up sit under the riddle, and New Quest starts over.
• Phone & tablet: tap the boxes to type and tap the buttons (the operators need the quote, minus and colon keys).
• "How the search engine works" under the game lists the operators.

• Pick the rarest word in the riddle: inventor matches 8 articles, but kite or lens matches one.
• When a word appears everywhere, filter with intitle: or keyword:, or use a minus sign to drop the wrong articles.
• Some riddles take two steps: find a name or a place first, then search for it.
• Read the whole result before answering: a wrong answer costs a search, just like a hint.

Query Quest practises the searching half of research: choosing words that are rare enough to matter and using operators to cut a long list of results down to the one that answers the question.

• Skills: search skills, search operators, reading for evidence, information literacy
• Best for: roughly grades 5–12 (ages 10+)
• For parents & teachers: the operators work the same way in real web search, so a riddle solved here makes a good starting point for searching a real topic.

Two of Query Quest's operators work as they do on the web: quotation marks keep a phrase together and a minus sign leaves a word out, as in Google (Google Search: search syntax). intitle:, which looks only at page titles, is another Google operator, best known from Google hacking. keyword: is the game's own: it searches the tags under each article.

The engine also uses two old ideas from information retrieval. It ignores very common words: Hans Peter Luhn of IBM, a pioneer of the field, is credited with the idea of these stop words, which he used for his Key Word in Context indexing (stop word). It matches words by their stem, a technique whose first published version was written by Julie Beth Lovins in 1968; Martin Porter published another in 1980 (stemming).

The skill itself is information literacy. The phrase first appeared in print in a 1974 report by Paul G. Zurkowski, and in 1989 a committee of the American Library Association defined being information literate as knowing when information is needed and being able to locate, evaluate and use it (information literacy).

Query Quest is an original PlayPendium game. Velantria and every article about it are invented, so a riddle can only be answered by searching, never by already knowing. Quests take a few minutes, need no install or account, and the Daily is the same for everyone.

A free, original browser game on PlayPendium. No download, no install.