The Volokh Conspiracy
[Eugene Volokh, May 13, 2008 at 1:39pm] Trackbacks
We're a Googlewhack,

it turns out, for skill/et counter/intuitions (slashes added to avoid breaking the google hack; commenters, please act accordingly). My guess is that blogs are particularly likely to be googlewhacks, because they tend to aggregate generally unrelated topics on one page. Congratulations to Kristina Ackerman.

Dan Weber (www):
IIRC, 3 or 4 years ago, there was a Google summer project in which some college kid came up with a "permanent record" for a webpage: it would find the three words that uniquely identify a page, so even if it moved, you could find it later by searching for those three words.
5.13.2008 2:05pm
theobromophile (www):
I found one for my old blog - first part of my blog name, plus colour that begins with a "y," is six letters long, and means "green."
5.13.2008 2:13pm
PersonFromPorlock:
Gosh, and just last week I invented the (sardonic) phrase "as discriminating as a Google search."
5.13.2008 2:26pm
Chris Newman (mail):
So how did you go about finding a Googlewhack for this blog, Eugene? How many tries did it take you?
5.13.2008 2:42pm
liberty (mail) (www):
I had some pretty hilarious search strings with my last blog; though there are a lot of those I guess which are still far from a real Googlewhack. My new blog is too new, nothing really good yet.
5.13.2008 2:53pm
Eugene Volokh (www):
Chris: I didn't -- Ms. Ackerman did.
5.13.2008 3:38pm
gwinje:
What's a googlewhack?

Sorry
5.13.2008 4:03pm
Cory J (mail):
Gwinje,

It's the combination of two terms that produce exactly one result in Google.

That's why Eugene asks us not to reproduce the phrase, because Google will then list this page as a result for the term.
5.13.2008 4:06pm
DJR:
My guess is that you're right. It took me about three minutes to come up with "Knorr-Cetina Dannimal" as a googlewhack for the current home page. I don't mind posting this because, well, who cares?
5.13.2008 4:16pm
Uh_Clem (mail):
Is it cheating to create your own?

All you have to do is put two improbable words into Google, such as boomvang supralapsarian, see that it returns zero hits, and wait for the Google spider to index wherever you posted it.

There you go Eugene, you'll be a Googlewhack twice over soon.

You are very welcome.
5.13.2008 4:17pm
DJR:
Also

Pirates non-electricial (the latter is a typo on Adler's part I suspect)
5.13.2008 4:24pm
DJR:
raketchikov Googlewhack
bilski googlewhack
raketchikov Whiteness
raketchikov poof
raketchikov holodeck
non-electricial holodeck

This is stupid.
5.13.2008 4:32pm
Gary McGath (www):
The fun part of Googlewhack is thinking of a pair and testing it in the wild. As people have said, it's trivial to create them artificially, or find them by first examining the content of a page.
5.13.2008 5:04pm
theobromophile (www):
Is it cheating to create your own?

All you have to do is put two improbable words into Google, such as boomvang supralapsarian, see that it returns zero hits, and wait for the Google spider to index wherever you posted it.

I think so. It took me about three tries to find the googlewhack (perhaps there's more than one?) for my blog. Go with words that are improbable together, or two very rare words; I chose the latter strategy (each word returns approximately 55,000 google hits by itself; together, only one).
5.13.2008 6:21pm
Eugene Volokh (www):
DJR et al.: There are rules, and they make things harder and thus (in this instance) more fun. In particular, "Your two Googlefactors must exist in Google's view of legitimate words in this dictionary."
5.13.2008 6:39pm
lindaseebach (mail):
My son and his friends had a Google-based parlor game. Start with a search term, and each successive player had to add a word to the search string that decreased the total hits but not to zero (then you were out). A win was last person standing, one result being an automatic win.
5.13.2008 8:02pm

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