Ever heard of a Googlewhack?

December 12, 2023 1:47 PM

An artifact from a very different era of the internet, Dave Gorman's Googlewhack Adventure is a 2004 one man show about searching two words on Google and being thrilled if only one result is returned: that's a Googlewhack. Exactly how this concept can lead to 2 hours of on-stage storytelling featuring slides and a bit of unhinged ranting in parts is an exercise I will leave up to the avid viewer.

Being from the US, Dave Gorman is not someone I am familiar with very much, but I did enjoy this quite a bit.

posted by hippybear (38 comments total)

Ah I remember watching this on Google Video back in the day. I imagine it is very 'of its time'
posted by TwoWordReview at 1:48 PM on December 12, 2023 [1 favorite]

You might also enjoy his other show 'Are you Dave Gorman?' wherein he takes it upon himself to meet as many other Dave Gormans throughout the world.
posted by TwoWordReview at 1:52 PM on December 12, 2023 [6 favorites]

Dave Gorman is a national treasure and possibly the foremost exponent of presentation based standup comedy anywhere.

In "A Better World" he wrote to local newspapers (remember them?) asking for ideas to make the world, well, better, and built a show around the responses. One of which was, verbatim, "ALL FREIGHT ON THE CANALS"

He also did an entire show based on Reasons To Be Cheerful

A later one was called "With Great PowerPoint Comes Great ResponsibilityPoint"
posted by doiheartwentyone at 2:04 PM on December 12, 2023 [8 favorites]

I remember this phenomenon by a different name but I'll be damned if I can remember it. Now in the era of personalized searches it seems so quaint.
posted by look busy at 2:15 PM on December 12, 2023

You may also like his more recent series, Modern Life is Good-ish.I think he has gotten slightly more sensible over time, but he's still doing presentation-based comedy very well.
posted by plonkee at 2:47 PM on December 12, 2023 [2 favorites]

Oh this is lovely. I remember it from back in the day before I knew who Dave Gorman was. Now I'm familiar with him from Season Three of Taskmaster and also a few of the podcasts afterwards. Yay more Dave Gorman.
posted by jessamyn at 2:55 PM on December 12, 2023 [4 favorites]

Googlewhack

Now that's a name I've not heard in a lonnng time.
posted by Greg_Ace at 3:24 PM on December 12, 2023 [15 favorites]

The peak of that optimism must have been Dave Gorman's then flatmate Danny Wallace's Yes Man
posted by doiheartwentyone at 3:26 PM on December 12, 2023 [4 favorites]

I don't have much to say except that Dave Gorman is great, and that I spent serious hours hunting Googlewhacks back in the day, before I'd even heard of Gorman (though obviously the idea of a Googlewhack wasn't mine - I think there was a website for cataloguing them back in the day which someone must've linked me?) My preferred tactic was pairing obscure words with "exsanguination" - that got lots of whacks.
posted by Dysk at 4:39 PM on December 12, 2023 [1 favorite]

The idea wasn't Gorman's either, but it was a time when you could bring a meme from the internet to the (somewhat more) mainstream via a comedy show, which would be unimaginable these days
posted by doiheartwentyone at 5:13 PM on December 12, 2023 [2 favorites]

> I don't know exactly how or why the internet got this core of poison built into it, but it wasn't there in the early days. It wasn't even really there during the dotcom bust. But at some point we lost the beacon of the internet being a tool to pull us all together and it instead became a weapon of division.

only october can end eternal september
posted by bombastic lowercase pronouncements at 5:34 PM on December 12, 2023 [2 favorites]

Googlewhacking previously on Metafilter, Jan. 25, 2002.
posted by beagle at 6:30 PM on December 12, 2023 [5 favorites]

Ah, which means this post doesn't qualify as a MeFiwhack.
posted by Greg_Ace at 6:59 PM on December 12, 2023 [2 favorites]

I'm surprised his book, Dave Gorman's Googlewack Adventure hasn't come up yet; It is very good, and again, speaks to a bygone age.

I also remember a day in elementary school, late 90s based on the computer lab I was in 98 or 99, and someone introducing me to the term googlewack. There was a leaderboard website you could enter your combinations in and it would track them. With the ferver of a bunch of elementary school students avoiding working on their assignment a bunch of my classmates climbed the leaderboards. I don't think anyone got to number one, but I think at least one of them got to the top five. Mulitcoloured was a good word as I recall.
posted by Canageek at 7:28 PM on December 12, 2023

It turns out later that Greg_Ace actually coined the phrase Googlewhack, killed a meme over it, and is on the run from Empress Susie Dent because of the entire ordeal.
posted by MonsieurPEB at 7:30 PM on December 12, 2023 [2 favorites]

I found more then a few of them back in the day. It's crazy how different things were that this was even a thing.
posted by Carillon at 7:58 PM on December 12, 2023

It turns out later that Greg_Ace actually coined the phrase Googlewhack, killed a meme over it, and is on the run from Empress Susie Dent because of the entire ordeal.

WHO TOLD YOU THA -- I mean, I have no idea what you're talking about.

Also, at first I read "killed a mime" :D
posted by Greg_Ace at 8:39 PM on December 12, 2023 [1 favorite]

Though I have to say I'm all aboard for Empress Susie Dent.
posted by Greg_Ace at 8:41 PM on December 12, 2023

He knows what he did.
posted by Greg_Ace at 8:49 PM on December 12, 2023 [3 favorites]

I still remember my first (possibly only?) Googlewhack:

goaltending taupe

Apparently, I blogged about it (although the site sort of no longer exists) and here's my entry about it, dated Friday, January 25, 2002:

So Martha got me googlewhacking yesterday.

And I found at least one that returned just the single result.

The search terms were:

goaltending taupe

Now I find that by scoring my googlewhack, I have the incredibly impressive score of 8,447,100,000.

Beat that.

I think the most amazing thing of all is that both those sites are still up nearly 21 years later.
posted by juliebug at 9:23 PM on December 12, 2023 [1 favorite]

only october can end eternal september

Is this a gripe about AOL n00bs on Usenet? Deep cut.
posted by stopgap at 10:05 PM on December 12, 2023

On the credit-where-credisdue front, Gary Stock needs to be acknowledged as the coiner of "googlewhack", Dave Gorman the publicist.
cf Rich Hall's Sniglets lifting The Meaning of Liff from John QI Lloyd and Douglas Adams.
It's quite hard to coin a googlewhack in English and it only stands until the spiders reveal where you publish it. Easy-peasy in minority languages like Irish. Also mildly amusing to do it with people.
posted by BobTheScientist at 10:42 PM on December 12, 2023 [1 favorite]

Wow, haven't heard that term for what feels like a lifetime. I haven't killed any memes OR any mimes, though.

... he takes it upon himself to meet as many other Dave Gormans throughout the world.
He obviously needs to visit Dave's Takeaway in Port Douglas, Australia. I don't know about Dave Gormans, but there is a 'wall of Daves' there and any visitor called Dave gets their photo on the wall (including me). Bucking the tradition of business names not having any relationship with the owners, Dave's Takeaway is owned by Dave, who bought it in 2019 from another Dave.
posted by dg at 10:46 PM on December 12, 2023 [1 favorite]

I don't know exactly how or why the internet got this core of poison built into it, but it wasn't there in the early days. It wasn't even really there during the dotcom bust. But at some point we lost the beacon of the internet being a tool to pull us all together and it instead became a weapon of division.

Gamergate, 2014: the moment when the far-right realised they could do what they liked and get away with it.
posted by Cardinal Fang at 11:52 PM on December 12, 2023 [3 favorites]

> exactly how or why the internet got this core of poison built into it, but it wasn't there in the early days

social media? like even with eternal september it seemed like internet society things tended towards the positive but maybe that's just nostalgia talking. i feel like it wasn't until we monetized all our shit-ass uncles and racists aunts etc to have free permanent platforms & constantly amplify the cycle of hate did the corrosion really set in. like, usenet didn't care about engagement.

but maybe i'm just extra-cranky cuz it's 5am and this i gotta be at a client site before i normally get out of bed.
posted by glonous keming at 2:12 AM on December 13, 2023

The multitudes of Dave Gormans

Daves Gorman, surely.
posted by flabdablet at 3:05 AM on December 13, 2023 [3 favorites]

Somewhat horrified that this is now ~20 years old, I remember watching it the first time round, and Are You Dave Gorman? too, on an actual telly, probably a CRT one. Will have to rewatch later and feel horribly old for a bit.

Along with being a great comedian, Gorman is also now a regular cryptic crossword setter for various UK papers, under the pseudonyms of Fed (Guardian), Bluth (Independent) and Django (Telegraph? I think), possibly others now too. I find his puzzles entertaining and refreshingly free of the infuriatingly dated or arcane cluing that sometimes crops up in more traditional cryptics - it's nice to do a puzzle and see a reference to something popular from this century as part of the wordplay.
posted by tomsk at 3:10 AM on December 13, 2023 [2 favorites]

But do you get any points for finding Chilliwack, Vancouver's hit-making yacht rock band?
posted by credulous at 7:23 AM on December 13, 2023 [1 favorite]

I remember googlewhacking back in the day, I still notice it when it happens now and then, but very rarely these days with shitty AI generating crap as soon as you type it.
posted by GoblinHoney at 8:36 AM on December 13, 2023

I was wondering if it's even possible to get a googlewhack these days. Setting aside the exponentially greater level of content that exists on the web, and even if you discount the myriad of sponsored results, does Google's algorithm even index pages in the same way anymore, to where unique combinations could turn up?
posted by TwoWordReview at 10:43 AM on December 13, 2023

Wait, is this that Dave Gorman?
posted by straight at 11:03 AM on December 13, 2023

A few years back, I completely stumped google with my poor spelling abilities. I was trying to get a recipe for Pfeffernusse and could not figure out how to spell it. and FF tells me Pfeffernusse is spelled wrong
posted by kathrynm at 11:37 AM on December 13, 2023 [1 favorite]

The multitudes of Dave Gormans

Daves Gorman, surely.

Dave Gormen, I think you’ll find.
posted by penguin pie at 1:45 PM on December 13, 2023 [5 favorites]

does Google's algorithm even index pages in the same way anymore, to where unique combinations could turn up?
Well, I guess they could turn up if it wasn't for the search turning up some things that are specifically relevant to the search terms and some things that are there because someone made the highest bid to put them there regardless of relevance. I think googlewhacking was only a thing back when Google hadn't yet chosen to be evil.
posted by dg at 2:54 PM on December 13, 2023

What would be today's equivalent? Forcing an LLM to cough up personally identifiable information (a modelwhack)?
posted by bwerdmuller at 6:12 PM on December 13, 2023

All of this post and thread = great. I skipped the Dmitri Martin hype a few years ago for the most part, and had only seen a handful of comedians using A/V in their sets as an incidental or an illustrative punctuation, not as the medium itself or integral to the show. I was only vaguely aware of BattleDecks as a PowerPoint/improv game (at which jessamyn excels).

Then a couple of months ago, I traveled to London to see a residency of crazy-ass intersections of A/V, comedy, and video and sound collage, and I was pretty floored. And then, a day or two after that, before I left London, I was able to catch Sam Campbell doing a work-in-progress set, and it was an hour's worth of hilarious brilliant fast-paced chaos-muppet slides, yelling in a queensland accent, and audience participation. It really opened whole new avenues of exploration for me.

So then, I came home and wondered for a week or two why there wasn't anything like these shows where I live—but lo and behold, I found out about a regularly-occurring PowerPoint and A/V Open Mic night nearby. And I'm hooked and may have to start building slide decks.

And only now do I see this, a REALLY YOUNG Dave Gorman (whom I only knew from TaskMaster, too) totally laying out the foundation for a lot of what I'd been seeing and thinking about for the past couple of months. And I love that this show's a lot about serendipity, because that's what led me to this comedic-interest milestone in the first place: random chance.

Thanks for posting this hippybear... or should I call you THE ALGORITHM
posted by not_on_display at 9:10 PM on December 13, 2023

But I will say I am fascinated by the prospect of AV open mics happening.

I think I am the oldest in the small audience by a couple of decades. There was one woman, couldn't be more than 22, whose presentation revolved around hating her little brother's girlfriend, interspersed with relevant anecdotes about trying to get citizenship, and the refrain in her set was (paraphrasing) "so, I ask for help from you the audience, how do i set this bitch on fire?" interspersed with slides illustrating things like "SHE HAS NO CAR, HE DRIVES HER EVERYWHERE" "SHE HAS NO SENSE OF HUMOR" "HOW DO WE KILL HER, PEOPLE?" "SHE WANTS TO KEEP HIM IN UPSTATE NEW YORK AWAY FROM THE CITY" "SET THE BITCH ON FIRE AMIRITE". It was not at the Dave Gorman/Sam Campbell level, nor was it really offensive and just more absurd, but it was in her unique delivery, this immigrant kid, just spouting this shit in front of a screen illustrating it, just hilarious as it was.

She brought along a friend, too, who was expecting a more jaded darker kind of audience. Found out that they coordinate sets for a club that does "Immigrants-Only Comedy Nights" or something, and it's these two fresh faces—kids!—so I am not fretting about the future of comedy. (God, the friend's presentation was just unspeakable in polite company, but really hilarious in a Bill Hicks type of way. His PowerPoint game was okay, but his dark comedy was DARK. I laughed, and two people walked out.)

I used to play Googlewhack in the late 1990s without even being aware it had a name and it'd become a thing. I'd just do it to pass the time, when Google was new, I had a basic graphics card finally and could see graphical internet, and Google was much better than Yahoo or Altavista. Never contacted any of the Googlewhacks, or kept track, because hey, I didn't know! but I did find a lot. Ah, late nights on a 386 with a 14.4K modem.

It's all coming full circle i tells ya
posted by not_on_display at 9:50 PM on December 13, 2023

TwoWordReview. . . he takes it upon himself to meet as many other Dave Gormans throughout the world
Adjacent: McCarthy's Bar: A Journey of Discovery In Ireland by (the hilarious, late lamented) Pete McCarthy - following the injunction "never pass a bar that has your name on it"
posted by BobTheScientist at 1:34 AM on December 14, 2023 [1 favorite]