googlewhack

A recent concept (Me give attribution? On the web?? You must be joking!!!) in waste of www time: Go to Google, and type in search terms which yield precisely one result.

Sure, if you type in ``"Mary Poppins" "tensor calculus" foo bar'', you'll get nothing. That's not a challenge! But try getting exactly one...

The next step after finding a successful googlewhack is to publish it on your blog, your friends' blogs, Everything2, SlashDot, Kuro5hin, and everywhere else. This has the unfortunate side-effect of destroying the googlewhack, of course. But such is the self referential online life.

Googlewhacks are parametrized by the number of terms or words that they contain. Of course, stepwise refinement towards a whack, as evidenced by words from the same domain, does not count. A 1-term googlewhack is relatively easy, as are 5-termers. The grail here is the 2-word googlewhack; for this writeup I came up with my first (current for January 31, 2002): "Tarski prokaryote".

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Zerotime recommends "monitron pants".

An important requirement of a googlewhack is that all the search terms must be dictionary words (that is, not proper nouns etc.) Google can confirm this by linking the terms in the blue bar at the top of the search that says "searched the web for..." to dictionary definitions. This method can confirm proper googlewhacks, but not necessarily deny them; Google's dictionary might not be complete. Neither "Tarski prokaryote" nor "monitron pants" are confirmed in this manner.

The googlewhacking webpage is (for the time being) found at
http://www.googlewhack.com
According to this page, the regulations are:

1. Googlefactors must exist in this dictionary . It's so easy to confirm: Google does the work! In the blue bar atop your Google results, accepted terms are linked to dictionary.com, and so appear 'underlined.' No line, no link = Googlethud!

2. Google also is the arbiter of a whack's uniqueness. Look to the right end of the blue bar atop your Google results. If you see "Results 1 - 1 of (any number),' you found exactly one hit = Googlewhack!

3. Google shows you an excerpt of the page you whacked. Look at that text. If it's merely a list of words, No Whack For You!

My contributions (only a few of which work anymore... ah how the web is ephemeral): subterranean wireworks; vaxen astrodome; succotash tactician; toolchest absentees; tolnaftate nostradamus

Google whack is an exciting new game played through any google search field. The object of the game is to find a two word search query, made of actual English words, using standard spelling, which return just *ONE* result. What makes this game interesting is not just trying to find incredibly arcane words which coincide on only one page. This will result in a very low score. The way the scoring system works is as follows: once you actually discover a google whack, put in each term separately and find the number of web pages that each term appears on, and multiply them for you final score.

Example:

manganese lolitas

returns:
Listing 1 - 1 of 1.
www.69-hardcore-sex.com/cunt-20.html

score:
manganese: found on 402,000 pages
lolitas: found on 1,830,000 pages

total score: 735,660,000,000

As you can see, in order to maximize your score, both terms can be fairly common on it's own, but only cross paths once. "Lolitas," as you can imagine is a very common word. But it's rare, in fact, unique, to see the word "lolitas" appear on the same page as "manganese."

A useful strategy:

• Pick two words which you think may produce few Google results and search for them.
• Examine the summaries of the webpages Google has found for you for any words you would not usually associate with either of your initial search terms.
• Replace one of your search terms with any such words.
• Repeat the process if necessary

Example:

• Initial search: Volcanology Bagpipe
• One of the summaries contains the very odd word "toadpipe".
• New search: Volcanology Toadpipe
• It's a Googlewhack!

Tip: Try using one common and one stupid/esoteric word in your initial search to get the highest scores possible.

An important thing to warn you about is...

If you have 1 result and it's a word list, HA HA, you're out of luck. HOWEVER, if you have 3 results, and 2 are word lists, then it sure does suck for you, because googlewhacking rules judge that as 3 results! Also, when google says that some relevant searches weren't included, IGNORE IT. Googlewhacking does NOT count that.

In other news, one of the hardest words to googlewhack is "jesus". It's possible, as the terms "polyribosome jesus" prove (or did, until I posted them) but extremely difficult. "Sex" is even tougher, but human nature being what it is, we can tie sex to anything. Therefore, the chances of googlewhacking it are slim to none. Good luck, though! Also, the following are words...

Sparkleberry (Sparkleberry Contrivance)
WooHoo (Neutrophil WooHoo AND agglutination woohoo! VALUE!)
asdf (asdf obscuration)
qwerty (unbegotten qwerty)

And so on, and so on, and so on. Good luck googlewhacking! Oh yeah... some people find it kinda lame to find one really rare word and mine it of all its uses. It's usually better to NOT reuse words.

And a few final words of encouragement...

CUBICITY IS A WORD.