Google Games
Although the work level is always pretty low by Friday afternoon, all productivity seemed to stop today when someone emailed this Guess the Google game to everyone in my office. The premise is pretty simple. You’ll be shown a selection of images that are supposedly the first few results from a Google Image search. Your job is to guess what the query was that produced the images. I managed to get 210 on the first try, which I thought was pretty good until some of my more tech-savvy coworkers figured out how to cheat and obtain a perfect score. Thankfully, the high score list is updated irregularly, so they didn’t get to enjoy their illegitimate status.
Games based on Google’s up-and-coming technologies like this one are by no means uncommon, either. Not too long ago, I discovered Brewster jennings Protects America, a Carmen Sandiago-type game that works off of Google Earth. There’s also Google Fight, where you input two search terms and let them fight it out. The winner is the term with the greatest number of results returned, which can make for some interesting outcomes. There is even an online competition called Googlewhacking, wherein you attempt to find two-term queries that return only one result. As you might expect, this is extremely difficult.
This only goes to show you how much better Google is than other search engines. Yeah, Yahoo’s got games, but they weren’t made by fans using APIs based on their less-than-robust search technology. I, for one, will be at the head of the line when Google starts indexing brains. All the better to search for those pesky thoughts you’ve been missing. 