Has Google killed the riddle?

A timely and entertaining blog entry from famous author and physician, Abraham Varghese...

So I'll often ask a medical student or resident, "Why do we say, 'Beware of the patient with a glass eye and a big liver?'
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Ideally that's how a student would reason. If however the student were to decide to "google" the question by typing in "glass eye and big liver" as I just did, the first hit is NEJM: Solution to a Medical Mystery, which gives the answer to a photoquiz the New England Journal of Medicine put in its pages in 1997, showing an elderly lady with one eye that was clearly yellow with jaundice and the other which was pearly white. (The latter had to be a glass eye because there is no earthly reason for jaundice in just one eye. And she was jaundiced because she had melanoma metastases in the liver.) A total of 928 readers had the correct answer. No surprise I suppose because it's an old riddle.

If the Journal were to repeat the photoquiz with a similar patient in the years to come, Google would lead the readers right to the answer.

Which is why when I offered a new riddle to my students last week while we were rounding, I emphatically added, "Don't Google!