Googlewhack
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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A Googlewhack is a Google search query consisting of two words that return a single result. Since 2003, British comedian Dave Gorman has toured Britain, France, Australia, Canada and the United States with a show entitled Dave Gorman's GoogleWhack Adventure and has published a book of the same name. These were based on a true story. While attempting to write a novel for his publisher (Random House) Gorman became obsessed with Googlewhacks and travelled across the world finding people who had authored them. Although he never wrote his novel, he did eventually write a book about his "Googlewhack adventure" which went on to be a Sunday Times #1 best seller in the UK and has also been published in the U.S. and Canada. A translation is in the works for Japan.
Some of the googlewhacks used by Dave Gorman in his book are Francophile Namesakes, dork turnspit, unconstructive superegos, bibliophilic sandwiched, dripstone ingles, mutalisk blastocyst and Lynsey Emersic. Due to the attention brought to these searches by the book, very few still actually work.
According to Gorman, a true Googlewhack should also be made up only of words that appear in Google's linked dictionary. To check this the searched-for words will appear in the searched bar as underlined text indicating that a link exists directing to the word's dictionary entry. Otherwise, made-up and highly unusual words can be entered to make a Googlewhack much more likely.
See also
- Googlefight
- Hapax legomenon
- Statistically Improbable Phrases – finds phrases in Amazon books unlikely to appear in any other book indexed
