Editor's Weekly Ramblings 31

Friday 7th Nov 2003

(Editor's Note - At the bottom of this ramble are details of the Special Googlewhacking Competition where you can win some Fantastic Book Prizes!) Note - The Prize has now been won! The winners of our Googlewhacking Competition were Steve Randall and Ian Harris. Well done Guys! Googlewhacking

Googlewhacking is a sport that is as competitive as Olympic Rowing, Pentathlon, Heptathlon and any other 'tathlon' that you care to mention. You may or may not have heard of it, depending on your penchant for the absurd, the whacky, the downright weird. But like death and taxes it is a phenomena that is out there and will swallow your sanity if you let it.

Googlewhacking is the art of putting two words (no quotes) into that most friendly of search engines Google.com e.g chair eaters - and trying to return a single web result. Now, that sounds easy when you say it quickly, but go ahead, visit www.google.com and give it a try. Chair eaters sounded like a pretty unlikely pair of words to me to be together on one page, but google had 34,200 results for it! So, it would appear that not only are there folk out there who eat a chair - they eat chair's' ie more than one! I don't know about you but I would have thought one sofa a day was enough for anybody.

I should stress that the words do not need to be a phrase, or make any kind of obvious sense, but they do need to be proper words that you can find in the dictionary. Google does the hard work for you on this one, because its database is linked into dictionary.com; so if it doesn't like the word, then for the purposes of this sport, nor do we. Also, it has to be a proper webpage; and not just a list of words! So no decompiling a dictionary and putting the entire list online. IT DOESN'T COUNT PEOPLE!! (You can find the full rules list here) I didn't make this stuff up. You can read about the history of google whacking here.

Oh yes. One last thing. Computers are clearly the way to go if you wanted to find every last conceivable googlewhack. Yes, yawn, you could get a dictionary name list and write a program to cross match against Google.com. But firstly, Google will hate you for bugging their database. And secondly, and far more importantly, it is cheating. Thirdly, it is simply ungentlemanly conduct. This is the web equivalent of slamming doors in ladies faces rather then opening them. It is simply not the done thing.