Google For Dummies

In Pursuit of the Googlewhack

It started a few years ago, and has grown as an underground-cum-mainstream time-waster. The game is called Googlewhacking, and its goal is to obtain just one Google result for a two-word keyword string. A few recent triumphs (they’re not mine) follow:

ambidextrous scallywags

squirreling dervishes

fetishized armadillo

anxiousness scheduler

There is nothing official about Googlewhacking, so rules might seem excessively officious, but you won’t get a whack recorded on the Googlewhack site unless it conforms to certain guidelines:

• No quotes: Using the exact phrase operator (see Chapter 2) makes it too easy to get a whack. Forcing unrelated words to exist right next to each other, as a phrase, instantly reduces results. Letting the words exist anywhere on the Web page brings in many more hits, toughening the game.

• No other search operators: Although not listed as a Googlewhacking rule, it makes sense. Any of the operators described in Chapter 2, standard or specific to Google, narrow results artificially and should be considered cheating. Use pure, unfettered keywords thrown into the entire Web index.

• No scripts allowed: If you’re resourceful enough to write a little software program that automatically queries Google with randomly combined words, don’t use it. It violates the spirit of the game, but more important, this sort of quasi-cheating takes the fun out of cudgeling your brain for almost-impossible search strings.

• Web searches only: You might want to experiment with image searches, Groups searches, or news searches (Directory searches are too easy), but as of now, results of these variants are not considered true whacks.

• Real keywords only: The Googlewhack arbiter is Dictionary.com.

• Real result(s) only: If you manage to produce a single result (which is harder and more gratifying than finding a four-leaf clover), that result page must be legitimate and meaningful. Pages that contain mere lists of words, or gibberish, don’t constitute a whack.

Play the game at Google, but visit the Googlewhack site for inspiration, history, and to read successful whacks and their humorous definitions:

www.googlewhack.com

The inventive definitions of whack strings are almost the best part of Googlewhacking. In one particularly brilliant set of whackinitions, the site fabricated all-Enron explanations for recent whacks (see Figure 15-1). Reading through the whacktionary is both amusing and inspiring.

Figure 15-1: Googlewhack definitions are almost the best part of the game.

Unfortunately, whacks are rarely permanent. Their transience is not due to the ever-changing Google index, but the urge to brag. If you promote your own whack, or record it on the Googlewhack site, that instantly creates a second page with your two keywords. Google will probably find it eventually. The Googlewhack site is already in the index, of course, so within a month (roughly, Google’s major update cycle) your whack will be ruined.

Googlewhackers are a strict bunch, but they look kindly on artificially ruined whacks as described in the previous paragraph. In fact, the name Heisenwhack has been applied to such disruptions in the quantum whackfield, after the physicist Werner Heisenberg. He, along with Niels Bohr, theorized that nothing exists without measurement, and the sheer act of measuring a phenomenon alters it. Hence, there is no objectivity. (This, however, is not the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, despite what some Googlewhacking sites tell you. The Uncertainty Principle is about the impossibility of measuring both the position and momentum of a particle.) The lack of objectivity relates to the unwhacking of keywords through the simple act of observing (mentioning the whack on a Web page) them.

Here’s a question. If finding one result with two words is a Googlewhack, what is finding two results with one word? (Try searching the keyword gastrolytic.) A Googlesplit?