Googlewhacking — Let the Games Begin!

Gary Unblinking Stock forwards a forward that forwards a forward, etc., that ultimately comes from Brooks Talley:

… OK, this is kind of embarassing, but I’ve gotten addicted to looking for combinations of common words which have the lowest incidence of appearance on web pages, as indexed by google. So far, I have yet to find a set of two common english words which do not appear together on any web pages.

The best I’ve done with three words is “orangutan popcorn fishwife”, which yields only one result. With four and more words it’s pretty easy to find combos with no results.

Gary responds:

Regarding your habit of googlewhacking (nice triple entendre there):
1: flatness strawberries magnification
1: jeweler parkways pathways
1: florists parkways practiced

This may be too easy: let’s decide what the rules are! Options:

limit the number of letters, per word or total?
must be defined at http://www.dictionary.com?
pluralizations of nouns: valid, or excluded?
conjugations of verbs: valid, or excluded?

I’d nominate some categories, along with the elusive doublewhack:

triplewhack that all begin with the same letter;
triplewhack with words all the same length;
multiwhack beginning with sequential letters (1: applet badger catchy dabble)…

Probably not fair to acknowledge word lists (too easy to spoof) such as that last hit.

Here are the rules I’d like to see: Plurals and conjugations allowed, but the words not only have to be in dictionary.com, the value of the googlewhack goes up the more common the words are. (The exact metric for commonness will be announced later.)

Categories: Uncategorized dw