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Did you know you’re a Googlewhack?
Steve
No, as a matter of fact, Dave didn’t know! But a little explanation is
necessary in case you never heard of the word “googlewhack.” In a
nut-shell, a Googlewhack happens whenever you enter two words into
Google and you receive exactly one result. A Google result containing not
two, nor a thousand, and not zero, but exactly a single web page. Now
there are some more rules to it – your words must be contained in a
dictionary, and the result pages themselves may not be dictionaries –
but that’s about it. And in case you never tried, scoring a Googlewhack
is not as simple as it sounds (there are websites dedicated to nothing
else but googlewhacking, and listing those who found a Googlewhack
first [www.googlewhack.com]).
So when Dave was informed that he himself in fact was a
“Googlewhack,” he was stunned. The explanation, as he later got to
understand, was that one of Dave’s own web pages contained those
two words someone else had entered to score a Googlewhack. Of all
the pages in the whole wide world! What might be even more
improbable: when Dave met with googlewhacking stranger Steve a
while later in London, Steve ended up trying to find a new
googlewhack on Dave’s computer, and found one on a page owned by a
friend of Dave who lived in France. Dave says this struck him as an
incredibly fascinating coincidence, “since there are three billion sites on
Google, and I don’t have three billion friends.”1
And then, Dave caught the Googlewhack fever. Several googlewhacks
and a crazy bet with his friend from France later, Dave went on a
mission around the world to hunt googlewhack page owner after page
owner. How that works? Simple: Dave considered himself to be a
person who was found by a perfect stranger via a Googlewhack. Now
he wanted to know if he could continue finding others via a
Googlewhack all the same, and he aimed to do so in 10 successions
before his next birthday. He would look up the contact address
contained on a web page at which he found a Googlewhack, and
would then travel trying to meet this person (via airplane, taxi, train or
whatever mode of transportation it would take). He would then ask
this person to try out to score a Googlewhack herself, and if that
would be successful, he would continue traveling to the person found
on that new Googlewhack page.
While the concept of Dave’s Googlewhack adventure may sound simple,
executing it wasn’t. First of all, not every page Dave found contained a
contact address. Also, not everyone wanted to meet him, or
googlewhack for him. And there was a good chance that person, even
though willing to help out, wasn’t able to find another Googlewhack. All
in all, as Dave puts it, “Googlewhacking has taken me around the
world. Three times. I’ve played table tennis with a nine year old boy in
Boston, and I’ve been way too familiar with some snakes in LA. I’ve
met mini-drivers in North Wales and hippies in Memphis.”2 Now I
won’t spoil the ending, so if you want to find out if Dave was
successful or if he lost this bet with his French friend, take a look at
the book or fun DVD of the live show (www.55fun.com/15.1). In the
meantime, you might want to try finding a Googlewhack yourself... or
send Dave another email. Who knows what might happen?
End Notes
1. Barratt, A. World wide whack. (2004). (www.55fun.com/15.3)
2. Googlewhack Adventure homepage. (davegorman.com/googlewhack.htm)