A Search Meme

David Ng of The World's Fair has been playing with viral marketing and Google bombing, and the experience has given him an idea for a nifty new meme. The way it works is this: Try to come up with 5 different search phrases for which, when entered into Google, your blog is the number one hit. The search phrase can be enclosed in quotes if necessary, but obviously it is even better if it works without the quotes. A commenter at David Ng's post (and by the way, read those comments at your own risk--some of them aren't pretty) suggests scoring the search phrases based on the number of hits. So, the ideal search phrase would have your blog being number one out of something like a million hits returned.

As it turns out, this is much easier to do than it might sound. Looking back at my previous post, Steven Pinker's formula gives an estimate of the number of distinct sentences one can utter, which comes out to be the enormous value of 10²⁰. Given that, it is perhaps not too surprising that we might have some catch phrases that appear more or less uniquely in our writing. (The key to getting the hit counts high at the same time is to have those catch phrases made up of a few words that individually are common.) So without further ado, here are some search phrases that (as of this writing) give this blog as the number one hit:

• intractable yet easy


• theory dilettante


• ultimate collector's ipod


• homage to procrastination


• decay unto death

Each of those searches returns more than 100,000 hits. I'll add one more search string for good measure, even though it only returned a few hundred hits, because it links to one of my favorite posts (and because at heart I'm a nasty person): Bringsjord parody.

So that's it. Consider yourself tagged if you're so inclined, and have fun playing with search strings!