One-Hit Wonder
You don't have to be a search-engine fanatic, just a bit of a wordsmith, to enjoy Googlewhacking. While a typical query on Google, the popular search tool, may return tens of thousands of hits, the goal of Googlewhacking is to come up with a combination of two words that return just a single result.
The term was coined by Gary Stock, a Web researcher who lays out the particulars of the game at www.unblinking.com/heh /googlewhack.htm. He said the most enjoyable whacks were poetic, like ''blasphemous loganberries'' and ''unforeseeable hippopotami.'' ''They're also excellent names for rock bands,'' Mr. Stock said. (The best I could manage after 15 minutes of play was a score of 3 results for ''persnickety conch.'')
Mr. Stock makes no claim to having invented the game. Indeed, the concept dates from at least 1997, when a mathematics student at the University of New South Wales, Andrew Mitchell, played it using the AltaVista search engine. Mr. Mitchell, who now works for a technology company in Hong Kong, is not surprised to see it resurface. ''One thing that I have learned from nine years on the Web is that if there is a good idea, it occurs to several people,'' he said.
I always liked the idea of owning some unique search result on the Web. In the 1990's it was pretty easy to do this; just put some weird word on your page, even mispelled, and it would make it easy to locate your page in a search. But then the search tools started indexing differently and by 2001 there were too many pages to out there to make this work. But I still try to find something to put in my posts so I can go to Google and type that thing and have my page come up, all by itself.
It's a tiny thrill, but I'm amused easily. And it's not as simple as putting "blorgleflargle" on your page; if you do this, the word(s) should kind of mean something to you. After all, you're a noble blogger with standards to maintain.
Here are some words and phrases I search sometimes to see if I'm still the only person to use them:
MQMPAG (multi-quarter multi-player arcade game) or "ma-kyoo-empag"
MNMNPTH (an ancient being of questionable importance)
pretty atomic library (I'm just surprised that I couldn't find those words together in that order; I thought there would have been some anime comic or something out there)
fantasy alchemy reality time space (FARTS) continuum (again, surprised that humans still haven't exhausted every possible fart gag).
Anyway, I really had nothing else for today.
