Googlewhack
Encyclopedia
A Googlewhack is a type of a contest for finding a Google search
query consisting of exactly two words without quotation marks, that returns exactly one hit. A Googlewhack must consist of two actual words found in a dictionary. A Googlewhack is considered legitimate if both of the searched-for words appear in the result page.
Published googlewhacks are short-lived, since when published to a web site, the new number of hits will become at least two, one to the original hit found, and one to the publishing site.
appeared on the web at UnBlinking on 8 January 2002; the term was coined by Gary Stock. Subsequently, Stock created The Whack Stack, at googlewhack.com, to allow the verification and collection of user-submitted Googlewhacks.
Since 2003, British comedian Dave Gorman
has toured the United Kingdom
, France
, Australia
, Canada
and the United States
with a show entitled Dave Gorman's GoogleWhack Adventure and has published a book of the same name. These were based on a true story. While attempting to write a novel
for his publisher (Random House
) Gorman became obsessed with Googlewhacks and traveled across the world finding people who had authored them. Although he never wrote his novel, he did eventually write a book about his "Googlewhack Adventure" which went on to be a Sunday Times
#1 best seller in the UK and has also been published in the U.S. and Canada. A translation is in the works for Japan
.
Participants at Googlewhack.com discovered the sporadic "cleaner girl" bug in Google's search algorithm where "results 1-1 of thousands" were returned for two relatively common words.
Googlewhack went offline in November 2009 after Google stopped providing definition links. Gary Stock stated on the game's web page soon afterward that he was pursuing solutions for Googlewhack to remain viable. However, the game has not come back into play, and there is no word of when or if that will happen.
has discussed the idea of a Googlewhackblatt, which is similar to a Googlewhack except that it involves finding a single word that produces only one Google result. Lists of these have become available, but as with Googlewhacks they result in the Googlewhackblatt status of the word being destroyed - unless it is blocked by robots.txt or the word does not produce any Google results before it is added to the list, thus forming the Googlewhackblatt Paradox. Those words that do not produce any Google search results at all are known as Antegooglewhackblatts before they are listed - and subsequently elevated to Googlewhackblatt status if it is not blocked by robots.txt.
One way a Googlewhackblatt's status can be ruined is when an entirely unrelated website including the word is created. An example of this is the nonsense word
"Bumruff" which originally returned a single result (the surname of a woman living in Ireland in 1911), but once a person on Xbox Live chose the name as a gamertag, the word's status as a Googlewhackblatt was destroyed.
Feedback stories are also available on the New Scientist website, thus resulting in the destruction of any existing Googlewhackblatts that are ever printed in the magazine. Antegooglewhackblatts that are posted on the Feedback website become known as Feedbackgooglewhackblatts as their Googlewhackblatt status is created.
In addition, New Scientist has more recently discovered another way to obtain a Googlewhackblatt without falling into the Googlewhackblatt Paradox. One can write the Googlewhackblatt on a website, but backwards, and then search on elgooG
to view the list properly while still keeping the Googlewhackblatt's status as a Googlewhackblatt.
In contrast to Googlewhacks, many Googlewhackblatts and Antegooglewhackblatts are nonsense words or uncommon misspellings that are not in dictionaries and probably never will be.
A practical use of specially constructed Googlewhackblatts was proposed by Leslie Lamport
(although he did not use the term).
coefficient for the indexed World Wide Web (about 8 billion pages) was measured to be 
. This result is in line with previous studies which used under 20,000 pages. The googlewhacks were a key in calibrating the model so that it could be extended automatically to analyse the relatedness of word pairs.
Google search
Google or Google Web Search is a web search engine owned by Google Inc. Google Search is the most-used search engine on the World Wide Web, receiving several hundred million queries each day through its various services....
query consisting of exactly two words without quotation marks, that returns exactly one hit. A Googlewhack must consist of two actual words found in a dictionary. A Googlewhack is considered legitimate if both of the searched-for words appear in the result page.
Published googlewhacks are short-lived, since when published to a web site, the new number of hits will become at least two, one to the original hit found, and one to the publishing site.
History
The term Googlewhack firstappeared on the web at UnBlinking on 8 January 2002; the term was coined by Gary Stock. Subsequently, Stock created The Whack Stack, at googlewhack.com, to allow the verification and collection of user-submitted Googlewhacks.
Since 2003, British comedian Dave Gorman
Dave Gorman
David James Gorman is an English author, stand-up comedian and presenter. He has performed comedy shows on stage in which he tells stories of extreme adventures and presents the evidence to the audience in order to prove to them that they are true stories...
has toured the United Kingdom
United Kingdom
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...
, France
France
The French Republic , The French Republic , The French Republic , (commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France...
, Australia
Australia
Australia , officially the Commonwealth of Australia, is a country in the Southern Hemisphere comprising the mainland of the Australian continent, the island of Tasmania, and numerous smaller islands in the Indian and Pacific Oceans. It is the world's sixth-largest country by total area...
, Canada
Canada
Canada is a North American country consisting of ten provinces and three territories. Located in the northern part of the continent, it extends from the Atlantic Ocean in the east to the Pacific Ocean in the west, and northward into the Arctic Ocean...
and the United States
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
with a show entitled Dave Gorman's GoogleWhack Adventure and has published a book of the same name. These were based on a true story. While attempting to write a novel
Novel
A novel is a book of long narrative in literary prose. The genre has historical roots both in the fields of the medieval and early modern romance and in the tradition of the novella. The latter supplied the present generic term in the late 18th century....
for his publisher (Random House
Random House
Random House, Inc. is the largest general-interest trade book publisher in the world. It has been owned since 1998 by the German private media corporation Bertelsmann and has become the umbrella brand for Bertelsmann book publishing. Random House also has a movie production arm, Random House Films,...
) Gorman became obsessed with Googlewhacks and traveled across the world finding people who had authored them. Although he never wrote his novel, he did eventually write a book about his "Googlewhack Adventure" which went on to be a Sunday Times
The Sunday Times (UK)
The Sunday Times is a Sunday broadsheet newspaper, distributed in the United Kingdom. The Sunday Times is published by Times Newspapers Ltd, a subsidiary of News International, which is in turn owned by News Corporation. Times Newspapers also owns The Times, but the two papers were founded...
#1 best seller in the UK and has also been published in the U.S. and Canada. A translation is in the works for Japan
Japan
Japan is an island nation in East Asia. Located in the Pacific Ocean, it lies to the east of the Sea of Japan, China, North Korea, South Korea and Russia, stretching from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north to the East China Sea and Taiwan in the south...
.
Participants at Googlewhack.com discovered the sporadic "cleaner girl" bug in Google's search algorithm where "results 1-1 of thousands" were returned for two relatively common words.
Googlewhack went offline in November 2009 after Google stopped providing definition links. Gary Stock stated on the game's web page soon afterward that he was pursuing solutions for Googlewhack to remain viable. However, the game has not come back into play, and there is no word of when or if that will happen.
Variations
New ScientistNew Scientist
New Scientist is a weekly non-peer-reviewed English-language international science magazine, which since 1996 has also run a website, covering recent developments in science and technology for a general audience. Founded in 1956, it is published by Reed Business Information Ltd, a subsidiary of...
has discussed the idea of a Googlewhackblatt, which is similar to a Googlewhack except that it involves finding a single word that produces only one Google result. Lists of these have become available, but as with Googlewhacks they result in the Googlewhackblatt status of the word being destroyed - unless it is blocked by robots.txt or the word does not produce any Google results before it is added to the list, thus forming the Googlewhackblatt Paradox. Those words that do not produce any Google search results at all are known as Antegooglewhackblatts before they are listed - and subsequently elevated to Googlewhackblatt status if it is not blocked by robots.txt.
One way a Googlewhackblatt's status can be ruined is when an entirely unrelated website including the word is created. An example of this is the nonsense word
Nonsense word
A nonsense word, unlike a sememe, may have no definition. If it can be pronounced according to a language's phonotactics, it is a logatome. Nonsense words are used in literature for poetic or humorous effect. Proper names of real or fictional entities are sometimes nonsense words.-See...
"Bumruff" which originally returned a single result (the surname of a woman living in Ireland in 1911), but once a person on Xbox Live chose the name as a gamertag, the word's status as a Googlewhackblatt was destroyed.
Feedback stories are also available on the New Scientist website, thus resulting in the destruction of any existing Googlewhackblatts that are ever printed in the magazine. Antegooglewhackblatts that are posted on the Feedback website become known as Feedbackgooglewhackblatts as their Googlewhackblatt status is created.
In addition, New Scientist has more recently discovered another way to obtain a Googlewhackblatt without falling into the Googlewhackblatt Paradox. One can write the Googlewhackblatt on a website, but backwards, and then search on elgooG
ElgooG
elgooG is the literal mirror image of the engine searcher; not only is all of its content a reversal of Google, the search terms must also be written in reverse in order to yield the desired results...
to view the list properly while still keeping the Googlewhackblatt's status as a Googlewhackblatt.
In contrast to Googlewhacks, many Googlewhackblatts and Antegooglewhackblatts are nonsense words or uncommon misspellings that are not in dictionaries and probably never will be.
A practical use of specially constructed Googlewhackblatts was proposed by Leslie Lamport
Leslie Lamport
Leslie Lamport is an American computer scientist. A graduate of the Bronx High School of Science, he received a B.S. in mathematics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1960, and M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in mathematics from Brandeis University, respectively in 1963 and 1972...
(although he did not use the term).
Research applications
The probabilities of internet search result values for multi-word queries was studied in 2008 with the help of Googlewhacks. Based on data from 351 Googlewhacks from the whackstack, the Heaps’ LawHeaps' law
In linguistics, Heaps' law is an empirical law which describes the portion of a vocabulary which is represented by an instance document consisting of words chosen from the vocabulary. This can be formulated as V_R = Kn^\beta...
coefficient for the indexed World Wide Web (about 8 billion pages) was measured to be . This result is in line with previous studies which used under 20,000 pages. The googlewhacks were a key in calibrating the model so that it could be extended automatically to analyse the relatedness of word pairs.See also
- GooglefightGooglefightGooglefight is a website that allows users to compare the number of search results returned by Google for two given queries. The results are displayed graphically in a mixed Flash and JavaScript animation. Two animated stick figures fight on screen after the queries are entered, and then an...
- Hapax legomenonHapax legomenonA hapax legomenon is a word which occurs only once within a context, either in the written record of an entire language, in the works of an author, or just in a single text. The term is sometimes used incorrectly to describe a word that occurs in just one of an author's works, even though it...
- Statistically Improbable PhrasesStatistically Improbable PhrasesStatistically Improbable Phrases, Statimprophrases or SIPs constitute a system developed by Amazon.com to compare all of the books they index in the Search Inside! program and find phrases in each that are the most unlikely to be found in any other book indexed...
— finds phrases in Amazon books unlikely to appear in any other book indexed