Googlewhacking!
"What the HELL is a Googlewhack?"
Googlewhack: 1. A string of two words which, when entered into the search engine Google, return a single result. 2. A person who is responsible for the webpage on which a Googlewhack has been found.
Googlewhacker: A person who seeks Googlewhacks.
Googlewhacking: A web-based activity using the popular search engine Google to find a string of two words which return a single result.
Here are the rules of Googlewhacking:
1. No punctuation (inverted commas, apostrophes, hyphens, etc.)
2. Both words must be in www.dictionary.com (underlined in Google)
3. No Word Lists (must be real webpage of information)
TWO WORDS, ONE HIT
#1
This was the first photograph I found. It was in a book!
#20
In this photo we can see her shoes. They are red, suggesting that she is lively.
Googlewhack: 1. A string of two words which, when entered into the search engine Google, return a single result. 2. A person who is responsible for the webpage on which a Googlewhack has been found.
Googlewhacker: A person who seeks Googlewhacks.
Googlewhacking: A web-based activity using the popular search engine Google to find a string of two words which return a single result.
1. No punctuation (inverted commas, apostrophes, hyphens, etc.)
2. Both words must be in www.dictionary.com (underlined in Google)
3. No Word Lists (must be real webpage of information)
TWO WORDS, ONE HIT
One word followed by a space followed by another word. No hyphenated words, no use of "speech marks to denote a phrase like this". Only letters A-Z, no other characters or numerals. The webpage must be a page of information within which the two words have been used in normal context and not just a list of words. Read into it more at googlewhack.com/rules.
I'll tell you how I came about this fascinating word game. There's a British comedian called Dave Gorman who, without telling you his story, has a book and DVD by the name of Dave Gorman's Googlewhack Adventure, which are both fantastic. The book follows him all over the world where he meets dozens of Googlewhacks (people whose sites contain a Googlewhack) while trying to avoid writing a novel he was being paid to write. The DVD is a live stand-up show of him telling the same story to a Swansea audience.
I'll tell you how I came about this fascinating word game. There's a British comedian called Dave Gorman who, without telling you his story, has a book and DVD by the name of Dave Gorman's Googlewhack Adventure, which are both fantastic. The book follows him all over the world where he meets dozens of Googlewhacks (people whose sites contain a Googlewhack) while trying to avoid writing a novel he was being paid to write. The DVD is a live stand-up show of him telling the same story to a Swansea audience.
The DVD and book (both of which I highly recommend) inspired me to have a go myself, and after a couple of months of failure I'd pretty much given up, thinking that seeing as Dave's adventure was back in 2003, and today's Internet is somewhat fuller than the old days and that Googlewhacks must be near-impossible to find now. But there was light at the end of the tunnel, thanks to telling my friend Mark about Googlewhacks, we had a go and within minutes, saw those magic words "Results 1 - 1 of 1 for...", and here it is:
My first Googlewhack, click to view fullsize in Flickr
Note: I have purposefully avoided using the words in order to maintain its GW status
Note: I have purposefully avoided using the words in order to maintain its GW status
I was over the moon with this! It's a beauty! It was my very first Googlewhack! It obeys all the rules, it's 100% legit. I then went on to register it in the Whack Stack at googlewhack.com to get it registered under my name and to make sure they recognised it as a real GW (sometimes the Whack Stack rejects something you see as a GW because your browser or personalised search filtered the results and it's not a real one) and all was well, I had my name in the list (you'll find it a dozen or so pages in now).
A couple of days later I had another go and BANG! Another Googlewhack materialised on the screen from the ultimate power of my now experienced fingertips. Again, see for yourself:
A couple of days later I had another go and BANG! Another Googlewhack materialised on the screen from the ultimate power of my now experienced fingertips. Again, see for yourself:
My second Googlewhack, click to view fullsize in Flickr
Note: I have purposefully avoided using the words in order to maintain its GW status
Note: I have purposefully avoided using the words in order to maintain its GW status
And so I registered this one too. My name's in the Whack Stack twice now. My tactic is word-disassociation. I choose a long uncommon word and stick another word in that I think is most unlikely to appear in conjunction with the first word. It's not easy, though. Try it.
The great thing about this is the sorts of sites you find the Googlewhacks on. Take Dave Gorman's first GW as an example. He ended up spending some time trying to find one, and finally hit the jackpot with Dork Turnspin, which was found at www.WomenAndDogsUK.co.uk which is the website of a guy called Marcus from Birmingham who collects photos of women and dogs:
#1
This was the first photograph I found. It was in a book!
#20
In this photo we can see her shoes. They are red, suggesting that she is lively.
Isn't this brilliant!? This guy is so unique in so many ways. He actually collects second-hand photographs that contain women and dogs. He's in a second-hand bookshop and buys an old book concealed within which, he later finds, is the first picture above. He puts it to one side, and months later he happens to come across another picture of another woman and another dog. He sees the opportunity to start a collection and host them on a wesbite to share with the world. You might think it's a bit odd, and yes, you're not wrong, but isn't it beautiful in its own special way? I think so.
I hope you enjoyed my write-up about Googlewhacks and hope you will try to find one for yourself. Please comment to let me know if you do find one, make sure you stick to the rules and remember to register it at the Whack Stack!
Many thanks to Dave Gorman for sharing this with the world. Another thing you should know about the guy is that he once went around the world with his flatmate Danny Wallace, on the strength of a drunken bet. Danny said that Dave couldn't meet "loads" of people who share his name. They set the bar at 54 Dave Gormans (or Gormen, to use the plural they use in the book), which was one for each card in a deck (including the jokers), and it turned out that there were "loads" of them, which they met on their journey. That was also a book, which I highly recommend, and came before the Googlewhack one. Oh and Dave is an amazing photographer. Check his pictures out at his Flickr: flickr.com/photos/dgbalancesrocks
I hope you enjoyed my write-up about Googlewhacks and hope you will try to find one for yourself. Please comment to let me know if you do find one, make sure you stick to the rules and remember to register it at the Whack Stack!
Many thanks to Dave Gorman for sharing this with the world. Another thing you should know about the guy is that he once went around the world with his flatmate Danny Wallace, on the strength of a drunken bet. Danny said that Dave couldn't meet "loads" of people who share his name. They set the bar at 54 Dave Gormans (or Gormen, to use the plural they use in the book), which was one for each card in a deck (including the jokers), and it turned out that there were "loads" of them, which they met on their journey. That was also a book, which I highly recommend, and came before the Googlewhack one. Oh and Dave is an amazing photographer. Check his pictures out at his Flickr: flickr.com/photos/dgbalancesrocks
I sincerely apologise if reading this has led you to waste a considerable amount of time of your life trying to find yourself a Googlewhack. Seriously.
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I like your proverb about rain.
Yeah, I read your post about A+E. Sucks man. I've gradually started to take things easier regarding studying and work. It's just not worth it to go full pelt all the time.
Also, that stuff on Inside Out was pretty sweet.
Glad to see you got your blog archive thing sorted. Regarding posts, yeah, I think the key really is regularity. Even if you don't think you have anything interesting to say, people are likely to want to read whatever you post. Keep going, you might reach 100 one day. :)
Oh, BTW. My brother asked me if I knew "the guy with the Firefox and Blogger t-shirt from school" the other day. Kinda cool.
Futurama is good, but for me slightly formulaic, much like The Simpsons, Family Guy etc. I'll watch it for a laugh, but all that stuff is a bit predictable these days.
Congratulations on your Googlewhacks. I've tried before, unsuccessfully. I also like books and programmes like you mentioned, where people go on some (often meaningless) adventure. Haven't checked out any of Gorman's stuff before though.
Yeh I think it's obvious when you take a moment to realise that the phrase "save it for a rainy day" goes alongside the concept of us having to stay inside because it's raining.
We're often bored, but there's always something to be done. When we're bored we find nothing to do, but when we're busy everything needs doing. Why!?
The only problem with my archive is it requires updating manually each time I add a post. That's why I got rid of the old one that was down the sidebar, I just left it. See, I haven't updated it with today's post yet (I'll do it after I've posted this comment). Also, the sidebar version didn't work the way I wanted it to, the numbering (an ordered list, which means when I add a new post at the top it becomes #1 automatically, thank God!) got partly cut off when it got to double figures (only in IE - it rendered perfectly in FF).
Oh yeh, I seem to have developed a following of lower-school kids who shout "Firefox!" at me at every opportunity and offer high fives. Is your brother one of those? I didn't know you had a brother, actually.
I think will try to blog more often, and I hope to get around to implementing my new blog-labelling system in the near future, whereby all posts will be put into categories and the user will be able to select which category of posts they wish to see, from things like parkour, literature, adventures, etc. - I'll have to think it through properly and hope it will work swimmingly.
Cheers for the comment. I have no idea who is reading my blog if they don't comment, so even if people just said some small note like "Nice post" or "Good pictures" it would at least allow me to acknowledge that they've taken the time to read it or skim through so I know who I'm talking to.
Keep up the good work on your blog.
Ben