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Alexis Madrigal

Alexis Madrigal - Alexis Madrigal is a senior editor at The Atlantic. He's the author of Powering the Dream: The History and Promise of Green Technology.
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The New York Observer calls him, "for all intents and purposes, the perfect modern reporter." Madrigal co-founded Longshot magazine, a high-speed media experiment that garnered attention from The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and the BBC. While at Wired.com, he built Wired Science into one of the most popular blogs in the world. The site was nominated for best magazine blog by the MPA and best science Web site in the 2009 Webby Awards. He also co-founded Haiti ReWired, a groundbreaking community dedicated to the discussion of technology, infrastructure, and the future of Haiti.

He's spoken at Stanford, CalTech, Berkeley, SXSW, E3, and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, and his writing was anthologized in Best Technology Writing 2010 (Yale University Press).

Madrigal is a visiting scholar at the University of California at Berkeley's Office for the History of Science and Technology. Born in Mexico City, he grew up in the exurbs north of Portland, Oregon, and now lives in Oakland.

How Do You Google? We Want to Know

By Alexis Madrigal
Aug 12 2011, 12:23 PM ET Comment

No one teaches how to Google. Through years of searching the Internet, we've all just figured out a set of strategies that work. In recent conversations around the office, we've realized that not everyone searches the same way. Some people search especially for PDFs or work out from a very specific search or drill down from a general topic. But as a bunch of practicing journalists, we're a weird sample.

We're curious about how you Google, so we created a simple survey that presents you with five hypothetical scenarios in which you want to know a specific piece of information. All you have to do is read the scenarios below and tell us what the first search string you'd enter in would be.

(A special thanks to fellow Atlantic senior editor, Derek Thompson, for suggesting this idea.)



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