55 Ways to Have Fun With Google | by Philipp Lenssen
A cabinet of search engine curiosities, riddles, games, and a little bit of usefulness
| Title | 55 Ways to Have Fun With Google |
| Author | Philipp Lenssen |
| Publisher | Philipp Lenssen |
| Year | 2006 |
| Copyright | 2006 Philipp Lenssen |
| License | Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 License |
| Amazon | 55 Ways to Have Fun With Google |
First Edition 2006
Made available by Philipp Lenssen under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 License. You are free: to copy, distribute, display, and perform the work to make derivative works under the following conditions: By Attribution. You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor. Noncommercial. You may not use this work for commercial purposes. Share Alike. If you alter, transform, or build upon this work, you may distribute the resulting work only under a license identical to this one. For any reuse or distribution, you must make clear to others the license terms of this work. Any of these conditions can be waived if you get permission from the copyright holder. Your fair use and other rights are in no way affected by the above.
On a spring day you can find your way
to a little flower garden
where the Googleheads play
You know they’re there by the
clothes they wear
And their Googlehead faces and their Googlehead
hair.
‘Cause they’re the Googleheads
They shake
their doodleheads
They’re the goo-ga-goo-ga-goo-gah
Googleheads.
Laurie Berkner.
Introduction- This book, in a way, is born out of my daily weblog Google Blogoscoped (blog.outer-court.com) and those who read it. Since 2003 I've been writing there ...
- 1. Egogoogling: Susan Is…
- Have you ever searched for your own name on Google, curious what the world has to say about you? Almost everyone of us did, one time or another. In fact, you ...
- 2. The Google Snake Game
- Here's a party game which needs nothing but a working internet connection (say, a notebook or cell phone), and Google.com's web search. The goal is to create ...
- 3. Memecodes: Survival of the Fittest Web Pages
- Memecodes are web pages with randomly created texts which are born and die over the course of time. How is that possible? By basing those pages on the rules of ...
- 4. The Google Irritation Game, and the Google Image Quiz
- This is probably the weirdest game on Google you will find online. Bemmu's Cure for Google Irritation (www.55fun.com/9.1) moves all kinds of Google-related ...
- 5. Googling Proverbs
- In his book Was Wir Wissen1 ( what we know ), German author Benjamin von Stuckrad-Barre tried to find the everyday life contexts in which proverbs are used and ...
- 6. Browsing Images of a Site
- If you want to see all images of a particular website, you can use the site: operator on Google Images (images.google.com) you may know this operator from ...
- 7. A Brief History of Googlesport
- It may be that all games are silly. But then, so are humans. Robert Lynd People today often participate in a challenge called Search Engine Optimization ...
- 8. What is Google, and what do people consider fun about it?
- (Image courtesy of Elwyn Jenkins. 2003 Verity Intellectual Properties Pty Ltd.) Google is more than just the search engine. Even though that alone wouldn't be ...
- 9. How Much Time Google Saves Us
- We might forget how much fun a search engine is, and how much time it saves us in doing everyday things, until the internet connection is interrupted and we're ...
- 10. Google Cookin' a Lemon Chicken
- Tara Calishain is the author of an online search journal called ResearchBuzz, and she's also the co-author of the fun book Google Hacks. On her website, she ...
- 11. Douglas Adams and the Google Calculator
- The Google calculator is included in Google.com's normal web search. So instead of entering words you want to find in web pages, you can simply enter math ...
- 12. Oops, I Googled Again
- Brian Mingus and a bunch of his friends were sitting together one evening, and after a few glasses of Italian wine, decided to write up a giant list of catch- ...
- 13. The Disappearing Google Logo, a Magic Trick
- Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Arthur C. Clarke Here's a magic trick to surprise your friends with. What they will see ...
- 14. Fun With Google Maps, the Wiki Way
- This chapter is a special one, because it wasn't written by me. In fact, it wasn't written by any single person instead, I created a wiki (a website anyone can ...
- 15. Dave Gorman's Googlewhack
- Dave Gorman is a comedian who goes to great lengths to get material for his show and books in fact, he would probably go to any length to get material. And ...
- 16. Google Q&A
- Google Q A is a fun answer feature built directly into the Google.com web search. It answers certain questions right above the search result, so there's no ...
- 17. Celebrate Google Non-Weddings, and More
- Christophe Bruno is surely having fun with Google, in his own ways. He's an artist, and many of his projects are based on the internet and Google. In 2002 he ...
- 18. Design Your SketchUp Dream House
- Google SketchUp is a 3D tool for creating architecture and other 3D models. Architects like it to prototype buildings, but the software is so easy to use that ...
- 19. Kevin Bacon and the Google Network
- You probably heard of the Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon game. The objective is to find a way to get from any actor to Kevin Bacon in six steps or less. For ...
- 20. The Google Alphabet
- Can you guess the top Google search result for the letters of the alphabet? For example, when you search for a , the top Google result is Apple Computer Inc ( ...
- 21. Google Search Tips
- How do you have more fun when searching? Simply: become a better searcher. Here are some syntax basics as well as advanced tricks or bits of trivia for ...
- 22. Googlepark
- Following is Googlepark: Scoble goes to Google (www.55fun.com/22) courtesy of Jamie Grant (Robert Scoble is a Microsoft employee with a popular blog).
- 23. Googleshare
- Googleshare (also called mindshare) is one of the most powerful approaches to have fun with mining the web for data, and answers. Here's how it works; when you ...
- 24. The Shortest Google Search (and the One Returning the Most Results)
- Can you find the shortest Google search that doesn't return any results, using only the letters a-z (no Umlaute or accented characters) and the numbers 0-9?
- 25. Google Rotated and Mini Google
- Mini Me, if I ever lost you I don't know what I would do. (pauses) I would probably move on, get another clone but there would be a 15 minute period there ...
- 26. The Google Quiz: How Much Do You Know About Google?
- Are you a Google expert? Do you know everything about the company and its services? Or are you still new to the topic, and you only used their search engine ...
- 27. Recreate Google From Memory
- Before you flip to the next pages, try something: take pen and paper, and recreate Google from memory. Try to sketch every link and other detail from the ...
- 28. The Strange World of Google News
- Google News is Google's automated news polling machine. It will display whatever it thinks is important today based on what other news sources write. The fact ...
- 29. Aliens Attack Google!
- Do you wish to see a full-scale alien attack take place on the Google homepage? You can! In fact, not only does Netdisaster (www.netdisaster.com) allow you to ...
- 30. Top Ten Signs You Are Addicted to Google
- 10. Your kids still believe the Googlebot is bringing the Christmas presents. 9. When someone asks How are you? you mouse-click in mid-air at them and say I'm ...
- 31. Dig a Hole Through Earth
- I wonder if I shall fall right through the earth! How funny it'll seem to come out among the people that walk with their heads downward! The antipathies, I ...
- 32. Googlebombing
- A googlebomb is when a group of people get together trying to push a site up the Google rankings a site which seemingly doesn't belong there. To do that, they ...
- 33. Google Ads Gone Wrong
- Google's ads are the way Google Inc makes money. They are displayed on Google search results, related Google services (like Gmail), or on any other site with a ...
- 35. Google Hacking
- Yes, I am a criminal. My crime is that of curiosity. Mentor, The Hacker Manifesto There's a sport called Google Hacking which is all about searching for ...
- 36. Googlepolls: Ask the Crowd
- You can use Google to search for people's opinions on everything imaginable. For example, you can enter I wish I had a ... into Google and see what people ...
- 37. Googlefights
- A Googlefight is when two search terms are being pitted against each other the one which returns more pages in Google wins. It helps if you put both ...
- 38. What If Google Was Evil? Plus: Five Inventions of the Google Future
- Google repeated their mantra in the statement attached to their IPO filing in 2004, when Larry Page wrote Don't be evil. This was to remind us what the big G ...
- 39. The Google Adventure Game
- To play this game you need a blog or other website where you can easily post something (you can also play it in a web forum, if the owner allows such games).
- 40. Egobot, Voice of the Web
- Egobot (www.55fun.com/40) is a tool which uses the web itself as its brain. For every question you ask Egobot, he'll try to find answers on Google within a ...
- 41. Fun Google Gadgets
- There are in incredible number of Google-related toys and gadgets around. Some are sold officially by Google as part of their Google Store. Others, Google Inc ...
- 42. Forty-Two, or: A Science-Fiction Interlude
- Jake Found His Mother Jake was the most curious fellow on earth. Everything he got into his hands he was reading with great interest. The web was the perfect ...
- 43. The Google Book of World Records
- You can use Google as a big factbook to find out everything about anything including the world's extremes. I call it the Google Book of World Records. To ...
- 44. Spelling Errors Galore
- Almost every spelling error you can think of has indeed been made at one time or another. It's only that before Google came along, we never knew all the places ...
- 45. Google Groups, Time Machine
- Google Groups1 is the name of Google's internet discussion group search engine. Not only does it let you search recent postings from the so-called Usenet, it ...
- 46. Growing a Google Word
- You can grow yourself a Google word, letter by letter, starting with any seed. Here are the rules to make it work. Take any letter, or a couple of letters. Say, ...
- 47. Most Popular Words, and PopSents
- Which words are the most popular? Which words are most used online? We can find out by searching Google for every word in a dictionary and then comparing the ...
- 48. Create Google Poetry, Prose, and Collages
- Wanting connections, we found connections always, everywhere, and between everything. The world exploded in a whirling network of kinships, where everything ...
- 49. Funny Google Videos
- Google Video (video.google.com) is Google's video service where you can upload your own videos, or watch videos uploaded by others. You'll find anything from ...
- 50. The Realplayer Fish, or: Telling a Story in Synonyms
- Google has a nice synonyms feature built right into the main search engine. Using the ~ (tilde) operator preceding a word, you can search not only for the word ...
- 51. Google Parodies
- Not all sites that look like Google are Google. Though there are some official humor-powered Google sites (like Google Klingon, Elmer Fudd Google, or Google ...
- 52. The Google Images Prediction Trick
- This is a fun magic trick to fool your friends, colleagues or family. Here's how it appears to everyone around you: You open up Google Images and demand, John, ...
- 53. Fun With Google Translations
- There are many useful things to do with the Google Translator (you'll find it by clicking on Language tools next to the Google search box), but I won't discuss ...
- 54. The Giant Google Painting
- I'm not sure exactly what inspired artists Sembo and Yae of the artist group Exonemo (www.exonemo.com) to create a giant landscape painting of the Google ...
- 55. Googledromes
- What's a Googledrome? It's a search on Google.com which yields the same top result no matter if it's spelled forward or backward. A Google palindrome, if you ...
- Acknowledgments
- Thanks to all Google Blogoscoped readers who keep the blog running full steam with their tips and pointers in the forum, or by email*. Thanks to Iolaire ...
- Glossary
- API Application Programming Interface (and other meanings); a library for programmers to more easily achieve certain tasks. Backlink A link pointing from ...
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