5 Years ago, when I googled myself for the first time, the main result that came up was “Charles M.A. Stine”, a material engineer who made explosives. Today, I find 52,900 results on google with unique people ranging from a dentist, an Inventor, an associates, an IT manager and about 20 others here. Indeed names are too common a tool for identification when you have more than a few hundred people not to mention the hundreds of millions on the internet.
Randall Munro originally used the 4 letter string ‘xkcd‘ to uniquely identify himself on the internet before his webcomic became famous. I though, “maybe it’s time I found a short meaningless unique identifier too”. I wrote a script to try and do just that:
import urllib
import re
#returns the string representation of the number
#note that strings of the form [a]+ will be skipped since numbers of the form [0]+ is equivolent to 0
def numToStr(num):
str = ''
while num <> 0:
l = num%26
str += chr(97 + l)
num = num/26
return str
#the page will have this string when no results are found
schstr = 'did not match any documents'
url = 'http://www.google.com/search?q='
for n in range(26**3, 26**4):
str = numToStr(n)
f = urllib.urlopen(url+str)
for line in f
if re.match(schstr, line):
print str
exit(0)
f.close()
But evidently that’s against googles terms of service section 5.3
5.3 You agree not to access (or attempt to access) any of the Services by any means other than through the interface that is provided by Google, unless you have been specifically allowed to do so in a separate agreement with Google. You specifically agree not to access (or attempt to access) any of the Services through any automated means (including use of scripts or web crawlers) and shall ensure that you comply with the instructions set out in any robots.txt file present on the Services.
I’m still looking for an answer: What is the shortest english alphabetic string for which google returns no search result. Of course the answer to this question this can’t be googled because as soon as the answer to this question ends up on googles search results, the result becomes invalid.
