Googledromes

Google Blogoscoped posted a challenge to find a query that returns the same top result when the query is reversed. Philipp Lenssen, the blog’s author, calls that a Googledrome.

Dave Pettit found that searches for Oprah and Harpo both led to oprah.com, and I managed to find a couple more Googledromes.

I had a hunch that it might be possible to construct (rather than “find”) a Googledrome for the home page of Google Blogoscoped. Naturally, a search for “google blogoscoped” returns Philipp’s blog as the top result. I searched for “depocsogolb elgoog” and found that Philipp’s blog was the last of four results.

That’s not surprising, because the blog’s home page doesn’t include the reversed words - they are found only in the text of a link leading to the home page, and the page with the link is going to rank higher than the linked-to-page. I had to find a way to exclude the linking page from the search results.

I inspected the Google cache for the home page (because that will match Google’s indexing). For each word on the page, I searched for its reverse. About half way through the page I struck gold: the words “live” and “evil” both appeared on the page. Searching for depocsogolb elgoog live brought the Google Blogoscoped home page to the top of the list.

But now I had a problem with the other version - searching for evil google blogoscoped returned individual blog posts which used the word “evil” more times and more prominently than the home page. I had to find a way to eliminate those pages from the results.

I could have continued to seek words whose reverse also appeared on the home page, but an easy option was available. Single-letter words are their own reverse, and by adding ‘e’, ‘g’ and ‘3′ to the search I was able to eliminate the individual posts from the results and bring the home page back to the top of the listing.

I ended up with a Googledrome consisting of the following two searches:

• g e evil google blogoscoped 3
• 3 depocsogolb elgoog live e g

This Googledrome won’t last long, of course. The home page of Google Blogoscoped is in a state of constant change, and when it is re-indexed the query results may change too.

Also, Philipp has hinted that he might change the rules to disallow single-letter search terms.

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 16th, 2006 at 2:13 pm and is filed under Internet, Search. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.