You’ve all heard it. The long silence at the other end of the “Phone-a-Friend” Lifeline on Who Wants To Be a Millionaire, interrupted occasionally by the quiet tapping of computer keys. Sometimes, the player in the Hot Seat will even rephrase the question before she calls to make it easier for hubby to look up on-line. “Chimborazo, C-H-I-M-B-O-R-A-Z-O: what country is it in?” Nowadays, you’re a sucker if you use your Lifeline to call your smartest friend. Instead, you should be calling your fast-typist friend, the one with mad Google skillz.

Let’s face it: Google and other one-click search engines have changed competitive trivia. Unless you can isolate your contestants in a Charles Van Doren-style glass booth, you can be sure that some percentage of them are going on-line to get the answer the second the question has been read. Jeopardy! now gives its contestant test on line, but they repeat the test in camera, so to speak, to weed out the cheaters who only passed with help. Radio DJs know that nobody actually knew who was on the first cover of Entertainment Weekly, but they sigh and give out those Coldplay tickets anyway. Pub trivia diehards watch carefully for the teams who always send one member sidling into the restroom with a cell phone after the very hardest questions are read.

So Google has changed what you can do with trivia. What are your options, if you want to give a fair trivia quiz that people will still solve with their brains instead of with their DSL connections? I’ve been thinking about this lately, since tomorrow I’m finally going to start the long-promised weekly trivia e-mailing (see here if you haven’t signed up yet). There’s no Official Rules and list of prizes and whatnot, because I didn’t want to write all the legalese, but I was going to keep track of the scores over the summer and maybe use them to give away some signed copies of Brainiac come September. But how can I be sure people won’t Google? You can just accept the Googling, like the deejays do, but then you’re punishing those who, like me, think trivia is only fun when you’re actually trying to solve it yourself.

At the 54-hour trivia maration that WWSP-FM runs in Stevens Point, Wisconsin every spring, Google has changed the questions dramatically. The organizers have ratcheted up the obscurity quotient to unbelievable heights (“What color is the girl’s T-shirt in that one Verizon commercial where…”). They also try this trick where they leave out the easiest search term from the question: “How old is Etta Place when she leaves for Bolivia?” for example, without ever mentioning Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid by name. The problem is, this just makes you do two Google searches: one to find out who “Etta Place” is, which answer makes it a lot easier to Google for her age.

Jeopardy! often asks Final Jeopardy questions that home viewers couldn’t Google directly, usually involving pulling a few names out of a list. But these aren’t Google-proof either. What are the only three states with 5-letter state capitals? You probably can’t Google “5-letter state capitals” and get the answer, but it’s easy to find a list of said state capitals, and pull out the 5-letter ones yourself.

There is still at least one question template that’s hard to solve on Google, if chosen well. That’s “What do these things have in common?” Then you name five movies, celebrities, cities, etc. As long as you’re sure that the answer is both Aha!-interesting and delimiting, they’re good trivia questions that Google may not be able to solve. So when “Tuesday Trivia” begins tomorrow, this is how the format will work: six questions every week, varying from easy to the very edge of hard in difficulty, which are probably no-brainers to Google. But there will be a seventh trivia question of the “What do they have in common?” variety. I’ll keep running total scores from week to week, but when I’m dispatching books to winners, I’ll use only the seventh questions to determine leaders. How does that sound?

(Sign up today if you want in on tomorrow’s debut trivia quiz. If you have ideas for other ways I can Google-proof trivia, post them here.)