Thursday 30 September 2010

Googlewhacking

Honestly, this post is totally SFW, despite the way it sounds...


The challenge:
  1. Find 2 real words (that should be checked using www.thefreedictionary.com) that produce 1 search result on Google.com.
  2. They can't contain any punctuation or quotation marks.
While this challenge sounds simple, it's deceptively difficult. For some good ideas of where to start there's a list called "The Whack Stack" of Googlewhacks, although they aren't Whacks any more, because the act of putting them on a page means they will come up in a Google search result.

This means that as new Whacks are found, the number of Whacks has decreased. Dave Gorman travelled the world hunting for a chain of people who were finding Googlewhacks, and I still haven't found one. I hope this means it's become more difficult rather than the alternative explanation - I'm stupid.

A few examples of my best Googlewhack attempts:
I started to re-use words with few hits, like "gluons". I also found that technical words generally reduced the number of pages drastically. On the other hand, ridiculous words don't help that much - so, so many pages with "sesquipedalians". The internet truly loves its irons.

I thought I'd hit upon a great result with 6 for Boson Brickabrack until I found that brickabrack, technically, isn't a word.
See if you can beat my attempts.

/Schlemmons

1 comment:

  1. In case you were wondering,
    Supercalafajalistickespeealadojus
    has 316 results, and is a word [according to www.freeonlinedictionary.com]

    XD

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