Googlenoping
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Written By Kate Zimmermann | May 30, 2007 | Share This
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In case you missed this Sunday’s Washington Post Magazine, Gene Weingarten published a brilliant survey on the newest classification of search terms, the until-now undefined, Googlenope.
Googlenope (n) : A phrase cannot be found on Google
Examples (from Weingarten): “Queen Elizabeth’s buttocks”, “Plush Osama doll”, “I believe dust mites have souls”, and so on.
As he explains,
“It’s pretty hard to find a phrase or expression that is not out there somewhere on the Web. I know. I’ve tried. No matter how unlikely it may seem that anyone has ever put certain words together, someone, somewhere, probably has. When I Googled the exact phrase “Santa Claus nude,” I got 278 hits.
It’s tricky. For example, I tried Googling “unintelligent Jew,” which not only denies a ubiquitous cultural stereotype but uses an unusual adjective to do so. I figured I was safe, but this is what came right up: “I have yet to meet an unintelligent Jew.”
More failures followed. After a while, I got mad and decided to do something about it.
Want a phrase that doesn’t appear on Google? Try searching for the Magritte-inspired, epistemologically impossible sentence “This phrase doesn’t appear on Google.” You should find only one hit, and that hit is from the very paragraph you are reading. When I wrote this, before it was archived, that sentence was nowhere on the Web.
Voila. The assault begins.
When a phrase cannot be found on Google, I call it a Googlenope. Once a Googlenope is discovered and written about, it is no longer a Googlenope.”
Thus, upon publishing this post, the term “googlenope” (and others listed above) will show up in multiple search results and by definition become declassified. Would we call this the “De-googlenoping”? Or, do we simply call it a “Googleyep”?
Read the full article for more details.
Topics: Blogging, Google, Just for Fun |
There’s now a website - http://googlenope.com — that’s dedicated to collecting reader’s Googlenope submissions and letting others rate them. Some are quite amazing; it’s worth checking out!