FWIW, if you enjoy this kind of stuff, you might like Daniel Russell's (Google research scientist, creator of A Google A Day) blog on using Google Search for research (and research on how people use search):
http://searchresearch1.blogspot.com/
He regularly posts quirky challenges (What kind of cow is in this picture? Can you see the Farallon Islands from San Francisco, and where should you stand at what time of year to best see them?). Also contains lots of useful information about the state of the query and engine, such as which search operators have been deprecated, or which obscure search operators no one seems to know about.