Antegooglewhackblatt

This article is firmly in the category “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.”, so don’t take it too seriously…

Do you know what an antegooglewhackblatt is? Well, an antegooglewhackblatt is something that comes before (“ante”) a googlewhackblatt. Being the inquisitive reader that I presume that you are, you’re now probably pondering over the meaning of the word googlewhackblatt…

The whole thing started with a game to try to find two words to search for on Google, and have the query return exactly one result. Someone came up with this back in 2002 and called it googlewacking. The term googlewhackblatt was coined later to describe a query with one word that returns exactly one result. An antegooglewhackblatt is then a search query for a single word that returns zero results.

An example of an antegooglewhackblatt is alphabetagummy. I’ve just searched for it, and there are zero hits. You have to do the search using quotes (i.e., search for "alphabetagummy"), otherwise Google tries to split your word into several parts in an attempt to return something useful anyway.

However, since this blog is indexed by Google, alphabetagummy will very soon cease to be an antegooglewhackblatt and become a googlewhackblatt. Alas, such is life!

As a serious aside, these things could actually be used to detect nefarious use of web scraping. Web scrapers are tools that read contents from websites in an automated way. The good guys use these tools for applications such as indexing the web. However, the bad guys use them to steal contents from other sites and put it on their ad-infested websites…

[update] As of 25 May 2019, alphabetagummy is officially a googlewhackblatt…