My sister and I enjoy Googlewhacking, especially if Radar's involved.

No matter how dirty that sounds, it's good, clean fun.  The art of Googlewhacking dates back about a year, maybe two.  To "Googlewhack", you have to have a lot of time on your hands, be bored out of your skull, and be connected to the Internet.

Googlewhacking is simple, and is named after a search engine.  Yahoo.  All you have to do is head down to their main offices, and begin whacking random people until everyone is unconscious, or you have whacked them one google times (a google is one followed by one hundred zeroes; even though it is used in the exact same way that "thousand", "million", and "hundred" are used, I admit it sounds weird).

Actually, that would be "service to mankind".  "Googlewhacking" is when you search for two seemingly unrelated words at google.com, and find out there are two hundred thousand web sites devoted to those two words.  Your goal is to find two words that, when searched, will pull up exactly one page.  Not two, not zero, not 3.14159265358979323846264338327950288.  The one major setback?  Both words have to exist at dictionary.com.

Recently, Radar, my sister (I will refer to her as Boba Fett), and I decided to try to get that elusive one hit.  Whether out of fun, or out of friendly competition, we whacked each other with hockey sticks in order to earn the right to use the Google search engine.

Early on, we tried "anthropomorphic compact" (which returned 1920 hits), "obscenity riot" (3470), "isotope cheese" (1660), "repugnant bowels" (1580), and "radioactive litter" (9970).

Being against those against the establishment (antidisestablishmentarianism) was not in the dictionary, and neither was a large cabinet with drawers and a place for hanging clothes (chiffarobe).  Then again, I'm not surprised.  This is a dictionary that includes the word "pokemon".

What was weird was when "metacarpal philange" didn't return any hits, yet "tibia clavicle" did (4650).  I guess some bones are more popular than others.

All three of us had fun, and at the very end, the winner was Boba Fett.  My "maple bevy" returned 1010 hits, Radar's "pillory sword" returned 1870 hits . . . and Boba Fett's "vulcanized epee" returned 1.  The hit: http://www.threvworld.com/southkeep/Docs/Tmh.pdf

We were disappointed, though.  After all that time, and all those searches, we were rewarded with some very dry reading.  Disgusted, we gave up and whacked some Yahoo employees.


©2002, CW Tyger
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