What’s the weirdest thing you’ve searched for (and found) on the web?
I had a friend who bought boxes at crafts fairs that had interesting ways of being opened (e.g., pull a dowel up and then the lid of the box rotates open). So for her birthday I looked for things like that. Within about 5 minutes I’d hit the jackpot by googling the words “puzzle box.” [. (The problem is finding the right words to google.)
Not something I looked for, but it’s too weird not to mention. There was some sort of political scandal in which part of the information (via Fark, naturally) that came out was that one of the people involved had a “cast fetish.” Sure enough, people looked for and found [url=http://www.fantacast.com/]many pictures](]example[/url) of women wearing casts.
So what’s the weirdest thing have you actually searched for?
And what’s the weirdest thing you stumbled across? (Though my example was a fetish, it wasn’t a nasty fetish, so let’s not have too many links to infantilism, bestiality and interesting things to do with poop. That is, unless they’re tastefully done …)
The recipe for a Danish rye muesli bread roll I tried 10 months earlier, on a weekend trip to Oslo, Norway. I couldn’t even remember the name of the bakery, until I did a search for ‘bakery, Oslo’, and found a telephone listing. I recognised the name (Apent, I remember staring at the name when we were there and translating it in my head), then found their website, which listed some rough ingredients, but not the recipe. I thought I would try emailing them and was totally surprised 2 weeks later to recieve an email detailing exactly how to make the bread. I have corrupted the recipe as I don’t have a great Danish Rye recipe, but works great with my sourdough. Mmmm, might make some this weekend!
Just now, looked to see if there were any sites that sold merkin, a word that’s bandied about on the board due probably to an article by Cecil and the internet crowd’s use of obscure words, the naughtier the better.
Lo and behold, [Merkin World](http:// www.merkinworld.com/) (link partially disabled, possibly not work-safe) is the third hit on Google. Cecil’s article is numero dos.
SpatulaCity, not one but two web sites inspired by Weird Al’s movie UHF (And they even cite their source. Who says all netizens are anarchists?) has got to be one of the odder things I’ve looked for. No real store, brick and mortar or web-based, has been named this. Yet.
Hmmmm. Would most likely be Surströmming. I don’t really remember where I first heard of it, but I had to look it up. And it is with dread anticipation that I know I will one day have to try it. One day when I least expect it, it will be presented to me and there I may very well expire.
It’s been wonderful knowing you all this brief time.
About ten years ago, when the web was just a little thing, I had some egg yolks leftover from a recipe that only used the whites. Recalling that at some point in the past, the great masters used egg yolks in their paint mixtures, I typed “egg yolk paint” into whatever my search engine of choice was that week (Excite, Altavista, what have you) and found no less than two separate message boards dedicated to the subject.
It’s a bit of a diversion, but I was challenged by my pupils once to find a ‘Googlewhack’, which they said was a set of words which returned precisely one answer on a Google search.
I typed in “zugswang pineapple” on my third attempt, and a legend was born.
travelmate
I was a truck driver at the time, envious that males could pee beside their rigs without baring their behinds, while I had to trudge all the way to the restrooms for modesty’s sake. Another female driver mentioned this product, but I thought it was a joke until I looked it up. Never got around to trying it though.
This one only weird in the aftermath. Many and many a year ago, I found I had a slightly higher talent for finding things on the web than many of my friends (this was pre-google days). A friend of mine decided to put me to the test and wanted me to find a childhood friend of hers that she hadn’t seen in 15 years. Last known location: Somewhere in Australia. As it was a female friend, it was fully possible she’d gotten married and changed her name. The search was on!
Two days later, I had bookmarked in my browser a New Zealand girls’ school’s student-made web-page. I kept wondering if one day someone was going to accuse me of some weird over-seas stalking, but I’d managed to find the woman’s younger sister, who was 15 at the time, and through her managed to track down the woman-in-question.
I think this was in the spring of 1995. I’d randomly gotten it into my head to see if I could find people on the Internet (which wasn’t much back then) who thought they were werewolves. I can’t remember what I put into Yahoo, but it was probably something along the lines of, “I think I’m a werewolf.” I got a bunch of hits and spent the rest of the day engrossed. The most fascinating part was that all of these people claimed able to have physical transformations into animals, and yet none of them could ever get photographic evidence of such a thing. Or even a witness.
