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55 Ways To Have Fun With Google  (View post)

Philipp Lenssen [PersonRank 10]

Thursday, November 17, 2005
18 years ago

Post your ways to have fun with Google here. Games, riddles, curiosities, anything.

Justin Pfister [PersonRank 10]

18 years ago #

You gotta take the chance and live in the moment. Please, write the book! Google, especially their blogsearch, is a great tool to use to find interesting people. I've found so many so far and the service has only been out for a little bit.

Fun – Is an action for the sake of acting. A stupid joke or an amazing thrill, falling in love, or a blog post. Fun isn't necessarily always a pleasure. I'm having fun writing this reply about what fun is and I'm not worrying about today or tomorrow or what anyone else is going to think. Google knows a ton about information, but more importantly, I believe they know that if they don't add to the fun of the life experience, then there's no point. Eventually all data gets deleted or corrupted.

Google is creating a world where we get to fly through data like a bird flies through the sky. We get to dive into the deep web like a scuba diver searching for the Titanic. Someday, Google Earth may let me find an old friend in China and another friend in Germany in the same hour. Does Google Earth let us travel faster than the speed of light? Maybe.. More importantly, Google lets us travel at the speed of our heart.. Towards the speed of fun!

  

alek [PersonRank 10]

18 years ago #

GREAT Idea Philipp on the book. But first, impressive you were willing to take a chance and leave your job – people sometimes make fun of "Corporate America" over here – not sure what it's called over in Germany, but I assume similar sentiments. Good luck with it all.

You've probably seen the Google Hacks book – I don't know if they talk about it in there, but I remember a really cool one about a year ago was punching in a string that matched the typical URL for an Axis webcam ... and you'd get hundreds of URL's to webcams that were OPEN to the public ... in most case, probably without the owner being aware.

Great example of where they were "open" anyway ... but with a search engine aggregator, it makes it much easier to find 'em ... with obvious privacy implications ... and possibly liability for those that left their webcams unsecured.

P.S. Nice scoop on Google Base – you correctly called it.

Cem Basman [PersonRank 1]

18 years ago #

I like that. If the vision is an economy in which anyone can follow their passion, learn, grow and develop by doing what they love most, whenever they want. Philipp, then you are doing a very good job here. My support for your work is for sure.

Nathan Weinberg [PersonRank 8]

18 years ago #

Well, regardless of content, I pledge to spend my cash on a copy.

Ideas? Hmmm....

The Google Card Trick (where you ask a Greasemonkey'd Google site and it magically knows the answer)

elgoog

Google Maps Risk

Bart Bonte [PersonRank 1]

18 years ago #

Great idea Philipp!
How about the in my opinion extremely fun game guess-the-google:

http://grant.robinson.name/projects/guess-the-google/

Good luck!

Philipp Lenssen [PersonRank 10]

18 years ago #

Thanks Alek, searching for Webcams is a great idea. I've just added it to the candiates.

Nathan, your ideas are great as well, and are added. Bart, yours as well!

And thanks Cem and Justin :)

Alex [PersonRank 0]

18 years ago #

Well good luck on the book! :) I will def. look for it out there.

Louis Foy [PersonRank 1]

18 years ago #

And why 55 and not, say, 75 ?

Philipp Lenssen [PersonRank 10]

18 years ago #

Louis, I might answer that question in the book! :)

Jason Schramm [PersonRank 5]

18 years ago #

Googling people.

Judith [PersonRank 0]

18 years ago #

Hast Du den schon gelesen?

http://focus.msn.de/magazin/magazin

Gruß
Judith

Nathan Weinberg [PersonRank 8]

18 years ago #

?intitle:index.of? mp3

My favorite Google command. Its the easiest way to find free music on Google.

Gerard [PersonRank 1]

18 years ago #

What a great idea, Philipp.
I can't wait for the book to be ready.
I'll buy it!

Personman [PersonRank 8]

18 years ago #

I think this might be too hard nowadays, but a long time ago I saw a google game in which you try to come up with a combination of two words that return _exactly one_ google result. Maybe three would be better? I dunno.

Philipp Lenssen [PersonRank 10]

18 years ago #

Personman, a variation of the topic "Googlewhacking" (that's what you refer to) will be in the book. I won't discuss Googlewhacking on its own because it's too old already, like you say, but I will discuss Dave Gorman's Googlewhack live performance.

david sanger [PersonRank 7]

18 years ago #

I like the idea of a Google A to Z , like a children's picture book it shows what Googlese is for each letter of the alphabet.

e.g.

http://www.google.com/search?q=a
http://www.google.com/search?q=b
http://www.google.com/search?q=c

A www.apple.com/
B www.btselem.org/
C www.c-span.org/

Of course it would change based on local googles, and over time, and perhaps with personal search also.

You could do a googleatoz page which showed them all

And of course there's a second level

Google AA to ZZ

http://www.google.com/search?q=aa
AA www.aa.com/
AB www.ab.com/

OR play "guess the top site for a letter pair"

Phillip, google.de mileage will vary, and perhaps also google.com from a German IP

david sanger [PersonRank 7]

18 years ago #

And for some reason there are also anti-searches

http://www.google.com/search?&q=-a
   gives eBay

http://www.google.com/search?&q=-g
   gives the Texas Lottery Commission

etc..

go figure

Philipp Lenssen [PersonRank 10]

18 years ago #

David, I love that Google A-Z idea. I did this too when I started out playing around with Google in 2003 and it's certainly something for the book. The idea to give it a quiz angle ("guess the company behind the letter "s"...) is also great. This will definitely be 1 of the 55.

david sanger [PersonRank 7]

18 years ago #

Great – do you get different results in germany?

also don't forget the integers 0 to 9

0 is business2.com
1 is mozilla.com
2 is shrek2.com
3 is 3com.com

etc.

--------------------------

Also you can play it in different languages.

The top A page in German is www.a-site.at/

The top A page in French is www.lemonde.fr/

--------------------------
A separate question is

"How many one character queries can you make [in English]?

there's 0-9 , a-z, [&]

any more??

[*] no longer works

swen [PersonRank 0]

18 years ago #

I have a couple of Bookmarklets available on my weblog. You can use them to search for audio (mp3, wma, ogg...) and video (avi, mov, mpg...) files.

Those Bookmarklets are also using the "intitle:index.of" string to find files in unsecured servers on the web.

http://swen.antville.org/stories/869232/

Tim [PersonRank 0]

18 years ago #

Love the idea. Now, with all the buzz, did you find a publisher?

http://iplot.typepad.com/iplot/2005/12/55_ways_to_have.html

Philipp Lenssen [PersonRank 10]

18 years ago #

Tim, there are some catch 22 "issues" right now which I'm either waiting for to resolve or working on. I'm optimistic, but don't have a final answer yet on how the book is going to be released.

saiko [PersonRank 1]

18 years ago #

I sometimes find it helpful to use google to resolve disputs like who's more evil, Google or Microsoft or which broswer sucks more, IE or Netscape.

So to find my answer I would search for:

"Google is Evil" – about 13,700 for "google is evil".
then
"Microsoft is Evil" – about 27,100 for "microsoft is evil"

This tells me as a whole, Microsoft is more evil

as for the brower dispute:

about 9,960 for "Netscape sucks"
and
about 79,100 for "IE sucks"

get the picture?

Caleb E [PersonRank 10]

18 years ago #

saiko, Google Fight is a good way to economize that process: http://www.googlefight.com

alek [PersonRank 10]

18 years ago #

I see you mentioned this again in a recent post ... two more things I didn't see in your list was GoogleBombs (since you happen to rank #2 for this term, surely you know a little bit about it!) ... and your PageRank100 incident ranks as one of the all-time funniest posts ... but (classic Philipp) has some deeper meaning about the signifigance of search engines in our day to day lives.

/pd [PersonRank 10]

18 years ago #

hey Philip, when you complete the googlewhacking book, lets us know. I'll lile to order one..will you autograph ?? :)-

Justin Pfister [PersonRank 10]

18 years ago #

How's the book writing going Philipp? I'm so busy with work. Update me via email if you can.

jay [PersonRank 0]

18 years ago #

i like this command:

-inurl:(htm|html|php) intitle:"index of" +"last modified" +"parent directory" +description +size +(htm|doc) "about me"
intitle:"index of" -inurl:htm -inurl:html doc

enjoy... :)
[edit – sig removed – nate]

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