55 Fun Things to Do With Google - #2 – Google Snake Game

Google Snake Game

by John Hughes
of http://www.oyster-web.co.uk

Last updated: 20 Oct 2006

55 Fun Things to Do With Google is a series of articles design to bring the lighter side of life to using Google. From Egogoogling to Googlewhacking and Google Translations, we show that search isn’t all boring.

We will add a new article to the 55 Fun Things to Do With Google series once every few days until the series is complete. The series is adapted from an original book by Philipp Lenssen.

The Google Snake Game

Have you ever played that party game where one person starts a story, and each player adds a sentence onto the end of the story so far to keep it going? Well The Google Snake Game is a variation on this theme. All that is needed to play is an Internet connection and two or more players. The object of the game is to add a word to the current search so that Google still finds results when you search for the new phrase you have created. You must use quotes around your search as you are searching for the exact phrase

Let’s imagine that Bobby and Billy are playing.

Bobby searches for “Rabbits” (27.9 million results)
Billy searches for “Rabbits who” (88,300 results)
Bobby searches for “Rabbits who eat” (296 results)
Billy searches for “Rabbits who eat anything” (no results)

So Bobby has won, because Billy broke the chain of results first.

Simple really. One more rule you might want to add though – you might want to reduce the size of your browser window so that neither player can see the actual results, just the search and the “1-10 of xxx results” part of the page. Otherwise adding a word to the end of the sentence is just a little too easy.