01/25/2002 Entry: "Google What?"

I've been too busy today to play, but I lost a good chunk of last night when I could have been practicing my Scrabble skills or playing a recent RPG download or playing the Sims (How are they coming, Mark?) because I was GoogleWhacking. No, wait, come back. I mean, I spent hours searching for unusual pairs of words (considered valid if they have both have definitions at dictionary.com) that returned a single google result together, and then scored by multiplying the number of hits each word would have got individually.

Need an example? The best one I've found myself is viridian acetaminophen: just one lonely PDF file (until Google finds this page). Searching for each of the words alone, Google found "viridian" 75,500 times and "acetaminophen" 150,000. So my score for it is 11,325,000,000. (The Google Results totals vary from time to time, so your numbers may be different.) Pretty good, but apparently people have made scores above 100 Billion. Wow.

Anyway, I now have lists of odd words and search results on pages of scratch paper strewn across my room now. Sigh. Guess we all know what I'll be doing for entertainment this evening.

(Link via David Sim.)

Replies: 7 comments

diazepam interregnum

Low score, but for some reason I feel so complacent about it.

Posted by Richard @ 01/26/2002 12:58 AM PST

you get power restored and this is how you celebrate it? playing google whacker? son, if i was there i'd whack your google. back in my day we didn't even know a google from a smoothie and we did just fine. when the power when out on us, the only thing we whacked was ourselves. how do you think you came to be? great snow storm of '73. Now how are you going to make hay if you're always whacking googles?

Posted by aaron @ 01/28/2002 06:07 PM PST

No, silly! I do all my Googlewhacking at work!

Posted by Casey. @ 01/28/2002 08:46 PM PST

geeze, i really need to have kids so that I can try to give speeches like that with a straight face. or to see how long i can carry it on before my kid realizes that i'm totally bullshitting.

when the social workers ask, "Why do you want kids" is it advisable to say, "for the laughs."

Okay, so that doesn't sound as insidious as I intended.

Posted by aaron @ 01/29/2002 01:43 PM PST

How about

Blastopore troll

1,871,740,000

Posted by Peter @ 01/31/2002 07:28 AM PST

"Ouch! That poor troll, keeps getting blasted by people like that..." Good one, Peter. You should submit it to Gary at unblinking.com.

Posted by Casey @ 02/01/2002 03:23 PM PST

mangle parrott carcass, only 576,000
but top phrase

Posted by mook @ 02/04/2002 06:24 AM PST