Squabbling Keywords

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Google's reputation as an arbiter of cultural relevance makes it the perfect source for a game that pits keywords against each other. Who is more important, Sean Connery or Harrison Ford? And if one gets more Google results than the other, does that really tell us something? The question seems ludicrous on the face of it, but considering the size and scope of Google's index, and the depth with which it catalogues human interest as expressed on the Web, there might be something to the idea.

Anyway, nobody is trying to write a doctoral dissertation on the thesis. Again, the point here is entertainment. Here are the three sites in question:

• GoogleFight at www.googlefight.com

• Google Smackdown at www.onfocus.com/googlesmack/down.asp

• Google Duel at www.sfu.ca/~gpeters/cgi-bin/pear/

The three sites are more similar than different, but each has strong and weak points. Figure 15-5 illustrates the home page of Google Smackdown. As with the others, the interface invites you to enter two keywords, phrases, or names. The engine then scrapes the results totals and throws away the actual results, leaving you with a count of the number of hits for each of the competing keywords or keyword strings.

Figure 15-5: Google Smackdown, one of three popular keyword battle sites. In this shot, Bill Gates fights Larry Ellison.

This is great fun. During a political season, pit one American Idol candidate against another. Who is really more popular, Clay Aiken or Ruben Studdard? (Hint: Count those telephone votes again.) Plug in any two names, concepts, expressions, objects, or locations. Put your home town against your friend's home town. Let Plato and Socrates fight it out in the Google index.

Remember 

Astute Google users might be tempted to put quotes around their keyword phrases to keep them intact, yielding more accurately competitive results. No need. Each of these three sites automatically adds quotes to your phrases (though you don't see the quotes) when they throw the search into Google. If you add your own quotes, around the invisible quotes, Google ignores the whole mess and treats your keywords individually. Then you get more results, but less accurate ones.

Figure 15-5 shows Google Smackdown and its keyword boxes. This one (and also Google Duel) requests that you use your own Google developer's key; it's only polite to provide your own key when a site provides space to enter it. (See Chapter 14 for information about getting a key.) Googlefight has a pleasing interface that puts your two keyword phrases in different colors.

When it comes to displaying results, my favorite is Google Duel, which renders an illustrative graph of the results, in addition to dishing up the raw numbers (see Figure 15-6). Notice the link to an advanced version of Google Duel. The page is actually called Google Duel for Writers, and it encourages users to enter up to ten synonyms or like-meaning phrases, to see which is the most Googly popular. As a writer, I can tell you that this 'tool' is more entertaining than productive. The result (see Figure 15-7) continues the graph format.

Figure 15-6: Google Duel displays keyword fights in graphical format.

Figure 15-7: Google Duel for Writers compares the popularity of up to ten words or phrases.

Overall, when in the mood for a keyword fight, I find myself going to Googlefight more than the others. The interface is the least pleasant, in my opinion, but I like the archive of interesting and amusing keyword matchups.

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