This week I was looking for an article about the pressures of media coverage on scientific research to send to a few colleagues. All I could remember was that it was in the New York Times recently, and had the words “perils” and “publishing” in the title. So I searched within Google News for “perils publishing science nytimes” and here’s what I got:

No dice. This seemed surprising, since I was certain I had the key details right. Next, I remembered that Jeffrey Flier, dean of Harvard Medical School, had tweeted the article. So I searched again, this time substituting Flier’s Twitter handle for the New York Times domain: “perils publishing science jflier”.

Immediate success. As we get more of our news via our social graph, we’re bound to recall the messenger as well as the the content. It’s a clear win for Google search to help us recreate those experiences.