This kind of contest is mentioned in Clarke's 1979 The Fountains of Paradise:
In his student days, he had won several retrieval championships,
racing against the clock while digging out obscure items of
information on lists prepared by ingeniously sadistic judges. (“What
was the rainfall in the capital of the world's smallest national state
on the day when the second largest number of home runs was scored in
college baseball?" was one that he recalled with particular affection.
I wonder if you're thinking of that scene from the Clarke?
This article points out that the same book predicts the Google News Alert
http://technovelgy.com/ct/content.asp?Bnum=729
But the same technology that had eliminated one set of tasks had
created even more demanding successors. Of these, perhaps the most
important was the design of the Personal Interest Profile.
Most men updated their PIP on New Year's Day, or their birthday.
Morgan's list contained fifty items; he had heard of people with
hundreds. They must spend all their waking hours battling with the
flood of information, unless they were like those notorious pranksters
who enjoyed setting up News Alerts on their consoles for such classic
improbabilities as: Eggs, Dinosaur, hatching of Circle, squaring of
Atlantis, re-emergence of Christ, Second Coming of Loch Ness Monster,
capture of or finally World, end of
Usually, of course, egotism and professional requirements ensured that
the subscriber's own name was the first item on every list. Morgan was
no exception, but the entries that followed were slightly unusual:
Tower, orbital Tower, space Tower, (geo) synchronous Elevator, space
Elevator, orbital Elevator, (geo) synchronous
These names covered most of the variations used by the media, and
ensured that he saw at least ninety percent of the news items
concerning the project. The vast majority of these were trivial, and
sometimes he wondered if it was worth searching for them - the ones
that really mattered would reach him quickly enough.