Unigoogling
I couldn’t get back to sleep after Ruairi’s 1am feed a few nights back – so picked up the laptop and started futzing around from bed (ahhhh Wi-Fi…)
Next morning, clicking down through the blogroll, I discovered Doc had just blogged the fact that someone else had also clearly been working on pretty much the same thought at around the same time, and blogged it before me.
I’m choosing to see this as evidence that Nathan Dintenfass and I are either:
a. two of the smartest people on the web, who just happen to share scarily close thought patterns, or;
b. sad losers desperately in need of a life, or;
c. one person, two identities…
I was going to toss this draft post away, but then I thought – what the heck.
So here’s the original blog, presented unedited below…
-%-
Earlier in the week, Doc described the results of an accidental unigoogle.
[Unigoogling, I’ve just decided, is the correct name for entering single character searches into Google.]
Doc was searching for some O’Reilly-related information and inadvertently hit Return after entering only the first letter ‘O’.
Thanks to the application of Clarke’s Theorem (‘Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic’ – Arthur C. Clarke), Google’s patent-pending Clairvoyain’t™ search technology managed to return the O’Reilly website at the top of the hit list anyway. Yikes!
This phenomenon clearly demands further investigation -- an Herculean labour the O’Connor Clarke Consortium is only too pleased to undertake for the benefit and edification of all bloggooglekind.
Here, then, is the first canonical list of unigoogles, recorded this April 9th 2003 [Ed. make that second canonical list].
DISCLAIMER: The results of any unigoogling are necessarily time-dependent and subject to variance based on the Google’s interpretation of the prevailing zeitgeist. YMMV.
Each entry below includes the relevant unigoogle, the #1 hit returned, and the associated stock ticker, where available.
Apple
Agilent Technologies
B’Tselem
Barnes Group
CNET.com
Citigroup
D-Link Systems (yay!)
Dominion Resources
E! Online
ENI Spa
F-Secure
Ford Motor Co.
The Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation
Gillette
H-Net, Humanities and Social Sciences Online
NONE (a missed opportunity for Hormel Foods, methinks)
Yahoo! (er…wtf? Is that ‘I’ as in ‘Iehovah’?)
NONE (candidates: IBM? IKEA?)
J-Phone
NONE (cue the JCrew IPO?)
KDE (not what I would have expected – the blue light special today is actually at #2)
Kellogg
L’Express (cheese-eating surrender media, perhaps, but top of their unigoogle category)
Liberty Media
3M (also works with the trigoogle: ‘mmm’)
NONE
SBC Pacific Bell Knowledge Network Explorer (er…)
INCO
O’Reilly & Associates
Realty Income Corporation
Alfred P. Sloan Foundation
NONE (sorry, they don’t list hip-hop stars on the NYSE yet, Mr. Diddy)
Q Magazine
Qwest Communications
The R Project for Statistical Computing
Ryder System
GNU’s Not UNIX! – the GNU project homepage (wtf?! Clearly somebody at Google k-nows w-ho’s w-ho)
Sears Roebuck
AT&T
AT&T
The whatUseek Network (interesting ODP-based search engine)
NONE (a nice space for U-Haul, perhaps?)
Bobby Worldwide (the equivalent of a Google-garbled telephone call, methinks: “No, no – not ‘b’: ‘V’!!)
Vivendi Universal
The White House (Question: would it still be #1 if he wasn’t called Dubya?)
NONE
Netscape (wtf? – I would have expected X.org or at least the X-Files, but I guess not…)
United States Steel
Yahoo! (Again. The only bi-unigooglee so far)
Alleghany Corp
Health AtoZ
NONE
The digits 0,1,2,3 and 4 all unigoogle to the W3C’s Markup Validation Service.
5 and 6 = Macromedia Flash Player download center
7 = Netscape 7.01 download center
8 = RealOne Player downloads
Eminem’s 8-mile.com, btw, is relegated to fourth place, alas (perhaps ‘4 Mile’ is the abridged version). He even gets his clock cleaned by Super 8 Motels, at #3.
9 = Number Nine Visual Technology
The remainder of the punctuation marks and other non-alpanumeric keyboard symbols don’t support unigoogling, I’m afraid.
Even the noble but overused @ and the seemingly obvious / produce a null Google response – not even a ‘No pages were found’ message. I guess the Google indexer ignores all such characters.
Bad news if your brand happens to be based on something such as /.
As I don’t want to run afoul of the francophone Canadian language gendarmes, I should probably complete this almost-canonical list with results for all the various diacritically-modified alpha characters (à á â ã ä å è é ê … &c.).
But it’s late and this entire exercise has already bored my entire lower body to sleep – time for the rest to follow suit.
Special final honorary mention to the #2 spot for the ‘t’ unigoogle – proudly occupied by none other than Blogger (your guess is as good as mine).
