"The Google Game"

[DoorNumberFour]

I'm really excited about this new project I'm bringing to WSIN, our campus radio station.

The basic premise (plus or minus a few wrinkles) is this: I'm going to plug a word, beginning of a phrase, or a letter into Google -- and Google will give me ten suggested searches. My panel of experts (read: friends) will then have to guess what those ten suggested searches will be. We played it at my place over the weekend, and it was a blast!

Prepare to be shocked, surprised, and maybe even informed!

It's called The Google Game, and it starts on wsinradio.org today at 11am!

[TLEberle]

So the reverse of Name! That! Autocomplete! then?

Interesting.

[Marc412]

The way I read it, it IS "Name that auto-complete".  If you wanted to play the reverse, you might give a search term, and the players would have to guess how few letters it would take for Google to suggest that term.

[TLEberle]

This is to what I was referring: NSFW Show, episode 1.

(If you don't want to watch: given a stack of search terms, the contestants must determine who google is autocompleting.)

[gameshowcrazy]

I'll be interested in how this works out since the autocomplete takes into account other searches that have been done on your computer.

I can type something into Google search on my computer, and the autocomplete will come up with something very different on my wife's computer.

[clemon79]

I can type something into Google search on my computer, and the autocomplete will come up with something very different on my wife's computer.

That's actually a feature here, not a bug. Prevents cheating for the most part. It's all guesswork anyhow, so the game is in guessing what ten suggestions it gave *to Christian*.

[JasonA1]

It should have been a "duh" moment, but I realized it makes a huge difference if you put a space after the word (or letters) that begin each "puzzle."  It's worth disclosing from the outset. The word pan by itself offered "Pandora," "Panda Express" and "Panera Bread," while the word pan with a space offered "Pan Am" and "Pan Pacific."

-Jason

[DoorNumberFour]

It should have been a "duh" moment, but I realized it makes a huge difference if you put a space after the word (or letters) that begin each "puzzle."  It's worth disclosing from the outset. The word pan by itself offered "Pandora," "Panda Express" and "Panera Bread," while the word pan with a space offered "Pan Am" and "Pan Pacific."

-Jason

That's taken into account in the actual game...I usually specify whether there's a space at the end of the word or not.

[mcsittel]

I've thought about "The Google Game" as well, with a different mechanic:

Given a subject (e.g., "The Eiffel Tower") and a limit of, say, two words (excluding the words comprising the subject itself, of course), choose words that successfully make the subject appear in the search results, earning up to 10 points for each one on the first page that includes that subject's name in the text in each of the entries.

I experimented with this concept initially by trying to find two consecutive words in a song's lyrics (NOT including words in the title) that, when typed into Google in quotes and searched, result in the song's title or full lyrics being returned without other extraneous responses.

[CarbonCpy]

I had an idea for a type of round in a panel game where the panel is given a search term and a picture that seems almost unconnected, with the goal being to suss out the context.  A picture of Snoop Dogg in a result for "Benny Hill," for example.