Some Light Relief—Googlewhacking

This is a great place to mention “googlewhacking”, the game invented by Gary Stock (or someone else, there are several who claim to have coined the term). Googlewhacking is for people who have not just too much time on their hands, but entire clocksful of too much time on their hands. The idea is to discover a set of two words in a Google search that out of the bazillions of pages on the web, return exactly one match. Recent googlewhacks:

  • ambidextrous scallywags

  • squirreling dervishes

  • panfish interrogation

  • disenthralled nimrod

  • insolvent pachyderms

  • hellkite flamingo

There are only three rules:

  1. Do not put your words in quotes. Quoting a string tells Google to find the words in that order next to each other, and that's just too easy.

  2. Both words must be listed in the online dictionary at dictionary.reference.com

  3. Online lists of words (dictionaries, glossaries, etc.) don't count as web page results.

Few of these terms stay googlewhacks for long. People put them in blogs, then the Google webcrawlers index those pages, and poof!

You can tell the world of your tremendous accomplishments by posting true googlewhacks to the website at www.googlewhack.com. There's a FAQ there, written in a delightfully sarcastic and insouciant tone, offering this justification for why three-letter abbreviations are not accepted as googlewhack terms:

The web and the 'net are not qat zek, nor pij sdo... and not all men can say pyx unp, but, yes... you may. But not now, and not for our use.

On the grounds that you can't have too much of a good thing, software developer Kevin Marks introduced the Marks scoring system for googlewhacks. When you find a whack, you search for the two terms individually and multiply the two page counts together. The product is the score for that googlewhack. The current record-breaker is the 292,698,000,000 of RCassidy's "linux checkerspot".

The whole Googlewhack phenomenon says something about the speed with which a meme propagates around the web. Googlewhacks just seem so 2002 now, as passé as bell-bottoms, beehive hair, and blogging. But, hey, whatever shorts your ports.

Stay well, write good code, and never pass an unexpectedly long string argument to a C routine that pushes an unbounded length parameter on the stack, particularly not when the string argument overwrites the return address with a pointer back into the part of the stack where another piece of your string argument contains carefully crafted machine instructions that will turn your computer into yet another zombie spambot. The world would be a better place if we'd all stick to Just Java.

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