Googlewhacking is the art of finding a two-word query on Google's fairly enormous database of web pages which returns one and only one result. It was a bit of a craze among webloggers a month or so back. Slow as I am to catch up with trends, I knew about it but didn't get around to playing until now.

Why does this merit a writeup, I hear you ask?

Well, the first thing you need to do is try it. It's not as easy as you might think. The rules are: find a two word query (with no quotation marks -- two words only) where both words are in the dictionary and Google returns one and only one result. Give it a shot. Go on, do that now. Then come back and read the rest once you've had a few goes.

It's the dictionary requirement that makes it difficult. It's pretty easy to find two sequences of letters that don't return any pages. It's almost as easy to find two sequences of letters that return one page; look for spelling errors, particularly creative ones, on pages, and then craft your query from that. But getting a real Googlewhack is a complete matter of luck. And thinking of odd words. It ain't gonna work if your words are "if" and "but".

But the really amazing thing is how difficult it is to find a query with only one result. The most abstruse combination of words can bring back thousands upon thousands of entries. And it brings home just how comprehensive the Google database really is. Up until fairly recently, search engines weren't overly useful; any given search engine only indexed a fairly small portion of the web, and it was out of date. That's why meta-search engines existed; instead of searching themselves, they merely ran your query on a variety of different engines. Altavista. Hotbot. Yahoo. Now, people don't use them. They use Google. Or Yahoo, which is Google in different branding. No search engine before this has engendered a verb based on its own name; people speak of "googling" for a word. No-one ever said, oh, I'll altavista for it.

Why is this relevant, though? Many other people have lauded Google to the heavens already. People are already aware that it does more as a search engine than others dreamed of, and that's why it gets more traffic than the rest.

Well, the Google people are technically competent. They've not really done any marketing; what they did was build a superior mousetrap and the world beat down their door, just like in the proverb. That doesn't happen much in the tech world any more. More and more (and this isn't just a dig at Microsoft, although they're more guilty than most) the products on the shelves and on people's machines are based around slick marketing campaigns. Choice is being restricted. Most computer users, I'd venture to say, don't even want to choose; they want to be able to play MP3s or burn CDs or draw pictures or write letters, and they're happy to do that with whatever they're given. In this kind of stifling atmosphere, it's difficult for code to win through just on its technical competence. Look at Unix; it's a much more powerful operating system than Windows or the MacOS, but it lost the war. There's the groundswell caused by the free Unixes, but it's not at a point where it threatens those with marketing budgets except in limited areas. Look at the BeOS -- where's that, now, eh?

It's refreshing to see something win because it's the best, rather than because it can tell people more loudly that it is.

Oh, and my Googlewhack? Miscegenation daiquiris.

(Update (19/05/2002): This googlewhack no longer works, owing to the existence of a Most Insane Things Ever Searched For page. I'm not going to try and find another one; it's a full-time task keeping them up to date as the web changes...)

(With thanks to Tim for keeping me honest)

© Aquarius, March 2002