This was vaguely inspired by the thread someone made a while back where people tried to find the smallest number that wouldn’t produce any hits on Google. I’ve come up with a new game to play with Google.
Here’s the game:
Find one adjective and one noun (both English words) such that if you enter them both as search terms on Google, you get zero hits. Your score is the sum of how many hits they have individually.
You can submit as many as you want, but it’s not a cumulative thing. The person who’s winning is whoever has found the one that’s worth the most points. Right now I’m winning with “renormalizable sasquatch – 333,400”, but that shouldn’t stand up long, because it’s just the first thing I could think of (which probably says something about me).
Note: You aren’t supposed to use quotes around the combined phrase. So, even though “distinct sasquatch” gets zero hits, distinct sasquatch gets over 4000, so it’s not a valid answer.
You should use google’s estimate of the results for the number of hits. For instance, even though it says “about 45,400” for renormalizable, you can treat it as exactly 45,400.
By the way, in case you haven’t figured it out, I called it the “Google Band Name Game” because the answers tend to make good Band Names.
"Copulating nuns" may get zero hits, but copulating nuns (no quotes) gets 2,180 hits.
Similarly, ejaculating eunuchs gets 369 hits.
It would be too easy if you just had to find words that are never used next to each other. The point is to find two words that are both fairly common, but are never used in the same page. The only reason I specified an adjective and a noun was because that gives funny band-name-esque phrases. But you’re not supposed to be searching for them as a phrase.
Damn my munchkin brain. It figures out ways to win rather than cool band names. If someone can think of an obscure adjective to go with “it”, I think they win. Perhaps the game should be changed so that the product of the two individual searches is the score. That would discourage people from picking a very common word to go with a very obscure word.
RULES CHANGE:
Let’s say your score is the smaller number of hits between the two words, not the sum. That way it doesn’t just become about pairing a really really obscure word with an everyday word.
So now “renormalizable sasquatch” is worth 45,400 points, because renormalizable had that many hits, and sasquatch had more.
I’m starting to think maybe I’m just bad at explaining this.
You have to find ones that don’t have any hits when both words are included. So if psychotic mistletoe (no quotes) produced zero hits, then it would be a 680,000 point answer (taking the minimum of the two individual hit counts, as per the rules change.) But because psychotic mistletoe gets hits, it’s not a valid answer.
IMHO, the winning score should be the smallest difference in hits between the two words to avoid the “one really common word and one really obscure” issue.
And I’m not just saying that because I’m winning by those rules.
Doh, I misread the OP. You want high scores, not low scores. I got hung up on the “smallest number” thread you mentioned. Well, my previous answer really stinks under the rules now, doesn’t it! Too bad, I like it anyway.
