h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

On search engines that use truly boolean logic, one can play a game called "one hit wonders." Using the "+" modifier with two seemingly unrelated words, one tries to find a combination that results in exactly one "hit" or website found. This is more difficult than one would think. For example, on altavista I just tried the combination of
"+turbine +daffodil" which resulted in no less than 109 returns. Not a bad score to be honest since finding a combination that results in fewer than 500 hits can be a bit difficult.

A few notes on using boolean searches. In the above example the first "+" isn't necessary since the first word is assumed to be a "must" unless lead by a "-". Also the space between words is important as well. The space tells the search engine that any website that contains the required words in any order is a "hit". However by leaving no space between the first word and the "+" (ie "turbine+daffodil") the words have to be adjacent in the order stated. So the example from the article could also be written as:
in+space+no-one+can+hear+you+scream
Of course the hyphen in the word "no-one" will throw off the search as it will exclude any sites with the word "one" in them. Stick with the quotes in that case.

http://www.googlewhack.com/ came up in the PR thread as a way to play this game with Google. I achieved a hit but can't remember it now - I think it included the word 'fruitage'.

Pimms

Fun game. I just found one: gorganzola priapism
Which is the answer to why the cheesemaker walks funny.

It wasn't 'mycophagous fruitage' (the results of Alice eating the Caterpillar's toadstool), but that gives the correct single site whack.

Pimms