Finding facts

Facts are birthdates, birthplaces, population, and other typical reference information you might find in an almanac. Here are two techniques of eliciting facts from Google:

1. Making queries similar to questions that you would ask to other people. They are based on concepts and should be ineffective with search engines. But Google has many predefined answers to such queries in its Google Q&A database, so they mostly work. The answers to such queries appear at the top of your results page. For example:

2. Making queries based on visualization of a text that answers the query, as it can be expected in a web page. In other words, suggest a sentence that would answer your question, and put a wildcard in place of the fact.

Here's a more complicated example:

You can omit the wildcard at the end, but results are often different with and without it. Also, although 'is' is within a phrase, it wouldn't hurt to reinforce it with the + sign.

Could you suggest more? :-)