Summary

  • Googlewhack asked players to find two accepted words yielding one listed result; publishing the combination could add a matching page.
  • The score list, crawler rules and validation disputes exposed the work of preserving a result while the search engine kept changing.

An excellent way to spoil a Googlewhack was to tell everybody about it. Find two words that lead to one search result, put the winning combination on a web page, and wait for the crawler. Your announcement can become result number two. Congratulations: you have publicised yourself out of the condition you were celebrating.

Gary Stock named the pastime Googlewhacking in January 2002. His early account spotted the publishing trap almost immediately. The game turned the usual search ambition upside down. Players wanted one listed hit, using two dictionary-recognised English words without quotation marks. Zero missed the target; a word list was an unacceptably easy place to land.

The rules made the search interface part of the referee’s equipment. Accepted words carried dictionary links in Google’s results header. The relevant result range had to show one listed hit. Stock’s history even gave an example where that range was one to one while another figure in the header was three. The game was being judged through a particular display, with particular counting rules.

A script called Whack! checked submissions for the score list, The Whack Stack. People still had a job. The FAQ explained that some word-list pages were caught before a score could be posted; others were identified later and labelled. Someone had to inspect what the apparently triumphant search had actually found. The rules also warned that submissions sent by email could take weeks to appear. A game about getting one result had acquired a queue.

Recording success created the next problem. In a note dated 13 March 2002, Stock said Google did not index The Whack Stack. The surviving June 2004 robots file asked crawlers to stay away from paths including /tally.pl and /whack.pl. Human visitors could see the trophy cabinet while crawlers were asked to leave those shelves alone. The original discovery and its celebration needed different treatment.

Even before publicity, two observers could disagree. The FAQ fielded complaints from players whose own search showed a winner while Whack! rejected it. The checker used what it could see from its own location; time and location could alter the returned result. Its observation settled admission to the list. A missing dictionary link could also prevent acceptance, even when the player could find the definition elsewhere.

The lasting joke is how much administration fits inside a two-word game. Search supplied the playground, a script checked the entry, people argued about word lists, and the scorekeeper decided which observation counted. Then somebody had to keep the record of winning from becoming another item in the search.