Sorry no I couldn’t think up a better name for this game, I had been watching Dave Gormans googlewhack the other day and wondered if I could make a similar game for google image search. After playing around for ten minutes or so I came up with the following three simple rules:
To make it more difficult you can have safe filter turned off and follow an additional fourth rule that the image must not be pornographic. Now you would think that such a simple game wouldn’t be very appealing and thus only a couple of minutes would have been wasted playing it. But to quite Dave Gorman nothing is that simple when it involves the internet and so I have wasted practically a whole day playing this silly game.
*After spending today playing the game I have added fourth and fifth rules.
Now naturally I began playing this game by entering in my own name “Simon”. And I found the following image:
This linked me to a cheesy Simon Kirke fansite which didn’t give me any reason to hang around after the seccond time the mp3 looped on the page. Any page that thinks auto playing music to me, is not worth my time. However I had a game to play and wondered where I should go from here. Then I noticed the yellow copyright tag on the image, it gave a name and I knew what I should then do. I typed Lucy into google image search and the following came up.
It would appear that female names are more likely to show images of women wearing very little, but I was lucky this time as the 11th image in was an image from Tasteful Celebs and thus I was able to continue playing, but not before having a quick look through the page for another real name to use, I thought all was lost as the comments section only gave me names such as but then I saw at the bottom the name Dennis and continued to google images to check it out. By now I had come up with the hypothesis that I would find much more porn connected to female names than male names, thus the likelihood of me coming across a pornographic image and thus loosing the game increased with female names. I thought now I would see if I could make it to ten names in a row and see if my hypothesis was proven true or not, for now with current evidence it remained true as the name Dennis gave me this:
The page is the self authored biography of the self confessed pipe smoker Dennis Womack. Evidently this image is neither of a girl, or pornographic so I continued down the page in hope of another name from which to flow from. This was the first page I had come to on this journey which actually held my interest, the guy has a rather cool hobby collecting and smoking pipes is more classy that cigarettes and thus allowed (not sure if there are any health benefits but the smell of pipe tobacco doesn’t make me want to vomit like the cheap cigarette tobacco most smokers, smoke). After reading through the page a couple of times my eyes fell across the name of his wife “Syler” I had never heard of this name before but he said it was his wife’s so I took his word at face value and entered it into google hoping for clean images. I wasn’t that surprised to see that google images didn’t give me that great a choice, but at least it wasn’t porn. Unfortunately due to copyright constraints on the page and me not wanting to post a tiny thumbnail here you will have to go here to see it, I got there from an index page of articles taken from the Northwest Indiana News this gave me a host of names to choose from and as there wasn’t anything of much interest to me on that page I just grabbed the first name (“John”) and entered it into google. This brought me to the following page in Stratford-upon-Avons website and gave me the following image:
By now I had become less interested in the content provided to me and more interested in finding 10 images linked in a row, so I scanned down the page for the first name to be mentioned and found “Robert”. This brought me to Robert Bradford’s personal website and it would appear he is an Artist living in Cornwall and the image google gave me was of him and his wife Penny hanging a frame, not only was it a nice image but it gave me the seventh name for my journey.
I held back for a second before entering it into google, so far I hadn’t landed on any porn images which was nice. But this was a female name and as my hypothesis predicted I had a higher chance of coming across an image which would end the game for me then and there. I took that chance and searched, finding this:
Yes a graph! This wasn’t a picture of a girl called Penny, but a graph of her “Wealth Dynamics Profile” more of which can be seen here. It would appear upon closer inspection of the page that she is the Founder of Ecademy a website created to connect business people. I decided that as the image was so far down the page, I would only focus on the “page area” it was on, saving me from reading through the entire page to find a name, the name given was her husbands (“Thomas”) and it gave me the following image:
Thomas the tank engine, it was a dead end! There where no other names on the page, even the image itself didn’t give rise to any leads. I was stuck, could this be game over? Had I lost at the 8th hurdle? Cursing xs-stock I thought back to the inspiration for this journey, Dave’s Googlewhack adventure and thought hang on, when he got to a dead end he just turned back and followed another lead. So what was to stop me from doing that, it wasn’t in the three rules so that is exactly what I did, I turned back. My seventh GooImage was Pennys and I quickly scanned through the page for any other names than Thomas, I held high hopes as I didn’t want to have to go back all the way to five and build up from there. I didn’t have to search for long as right at the top of the page under her 50 words was the name “Hannah”. I held my breath as I searched google for it and breathed a sigh of relief as the following image popped up:
It took me to a rather nasty looking web page, not nasty as in content but the aesthetics made my eyes bleed, wasn’t surprising considering it had been designed in Microsoft FrontPage 5.0! I once again scanned the page for a name and saw it had been “designed” by a J Turner. A name being a name (first or last) I entered it into google and was happy to be faced with the following image as ninth in the chain:
The image lead me to the homepage of Turner Sports Cars. It was interesting to read and find out about a British built car I had never heard of. The image itself was of the man behind the design and building of the car, a car which was only built during the years 1949 to 1966. It was nice to read a little bit of history on such a beautiful car. To think if I hadn’t begun playing this game, I would never have seen this page. I found the next name and my tenth link in this chain at the bottom of the page, the name Russell was sat almost next to the image and without waiting any more I entered it into google and found the following:
It wasn’t a picture of a person, rather a cartoon and the page in question was about the cartoonist Dan Russell. It was also the tenth link in the chain. I have to admit that at this point I felt the game had been too easy I had got to ten in a row with only one set back, if I where to play it again I would need to make it more complex. Also my hypothesis wasn’t proven either correct or incorrect as I had mostly received male names, this could be attributed to the fact that males dominate the internet but that would be a question to be answered another day. Instead I compiled the following diagram to show my journey and thought up two more rules to be added to the game.
It was at this point I noticed something odd. I had only done 9 links. I thought I had finished and won, but I hadn’t. I still had that 10th link to find. Fortunately this didn’t cause that big of a problem, the 9th link had provided me with many names to choose from and I went once again for the first in the page (Jim). Upon a very quick google I came across this:
Not going to comment on the image, just glad it wasn’t porn. It looks like the page is from someone’s blog describing a holiday they went on. For me it was a gold mine for names. However I had to take a break, spending this many consecutive hours on google does things to you. So that is where I leave the journey for now. 10 Links, 11 images 1 dead end. I wonder what tomorrow will bring.
