October 18, 2002

3:56 PM

People continually invent new games to play with Google and Amazon.com to find curious content and excercise the system. First there was Google Whacking (here and here). Then there was Google fighting, Google sets, Google image whacking, Google Bombing, Google Grokking, Amazon whacking, and Google poetry. What similar games have you played, invented, or enjoyed?
posted by Morphic (15 comments total)

I just don't understand why Googlingfucking hasn't caught on ...
posted by Shadowkeeper at 4:02 PM on October 18, 2002

Don't forget Google Groups art, now conveniently available automatically for lazy people. More in this thread.
posted by mediareport at 4:04 PM on October 18, 2002

For the longest time, this was the "best image ever" on images.google.com. That made me inherently at peace with the world.
posted by machaus at 4:05 PM on October 18, 2002

I didn't know about google fighting:

Metafilter vs. Wil Wheaton = 161,000 vs. 48,600

Dell Boy vs. Gateway Cow = 349,000 vs. 49,800

Looks like we're sleeping w/Ben Curtis, and Wesley's got nothing but a bovine buddy.

Heh heh.
posted by WolfDaddy at 4:05 PM on October 18, 2002

Oh, and instant google galleries can be quite fun.
posted by machaus at 4:07 PM on October 18, 2002

Then there's Gaggle.
posted by condour75 at 4:15 PM on October 18, 2002

Somewhat related to Googlefights is Google-as-spellchecker (this is less fun now that Google has its own "did you mean" feature, but it worked even before that was established):

excercise: 111,000 hits

exercise: 11,900,000 hits
posted by DevilsAdvocate at 4:16 PM on October 18, 2002

I've tried Google Cooking a couple of times with mixed results.
posted by Monk at 4:24 PM on October 18, 2002

Using google to find random personal pictures (shameless self promotion)
posted by Diddly at 4:40 PM on October 18, 2002

Here ya go Shadowkeeper.

But if you change the search, you get this. Which led to this.
posted by pitchblende at 5:10 PM on October 18, 2002

I've played doctor at google a few times.
posted by spotmeter at 6:33 PM on October 18, 2002

When bored last Christmas at the office we started a new images.google.com game. As we never really named it, I suppose I'll title is PeepingGoogle The basic rules were this:
1. any number of players pick a person's name - generally of the opposite sex but whatever you feel attracted to.
2. Turn off the safe search on images.google.com
3. Search for the name, just the name though - no additional words and see how many images you look at before you see someone nude. Just a portion fo the body if fine. It only has to be PG-13 skin or better.
4. Repeat as often as you need. Take note of names that have low google-porn rankings so you can win next time.

That was our game. It went on three times a day for the entire week between Christmas and New Years.
posted by DragonBoy at 8:16 PM on October 18, 2002

Our very own (but mostly absent these days) jedwards and myself (with the help of some Swell Pals™) invented Google Instant Messaging some time ago - sending secret messages to blogfolk using Google searches (cunningly concocted to return your messagee's website) and referrer logs (the mechanism to receive and read the messages).

I'm too lazy to link it, but it was fun.
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 12:47 AM on October 20, 2002

This guy has created a new poetic form: the search poem. The idea being that you type a phrase (the 'title' of the poem) into google and then make a poem from the results. The beauty of it is that you can either go defiantly anti-poem (ie. a solid block of text) or sculpt the poem (cut-up-style), discarding lines you dislike and rearranging at will.

Here's one I prepared earlier. Try it; it's fun!
posted by hot soup girl at 6:01 AM on October 20, 2002

Google Whirring
posted by urban greeting at 2:53 AM on October 24, 2002