Imagine a treasure hunt in which the minute you find the treasure it ceases to exist.

Everyday, hundreds of thousands of surfers are cutting to the chase in this quirky quest called Googlewhacking: The Search for One.

In a matter of weeks, Googlewhacking has gone from being one man's idea of fun to a 'wonderful new sport' that has captured the imagination of Web searchers, bloggers and even the media. CNet, Reuters, The Independent, Search Engine Watch and countless others have reported on this ephemeral game.

So, what exactly is Googlewhacking? Simply put, it's the search for the elusive combination of words that when submitted to Google produces just one result, called a Whack.

For example, 'consanguineous sororities', is a whack conjured up by yours truly. Unfortunately, the minute Google finds this page it will no longer be a whack.

The 'search for one', however, is not a new game. Way back in 1996, users of AltaVista were playing a similar game called One Hit Wonders. It was created by Andrew Mitchell, then an honours student at the School of Mathematics, University of New South Wales.

It all started one boring evening. "We were tired from the day's work," recalls Mitchell. "I was searching the Web on AltaVista (the best search engine of the time) and ended up with just three matches for my query. I had never seen less than a screen of matches before. Nor had any of my friends. So began the search for searches that had just one match!"

Gary Stock, who coined the term and created Googlewhacking, was unaware of One Hit Wonders when he first launched the game.

"After I coined the term Googlewhacking, people began mailing Googlewhacks to me. A few days later someone forwarded me a link to One Hit Wonders; that was the first I knew of it. At least four people have written to me claiming to have invented the whole idea! Say, has anyone patented looking up words in a dictionary? :-)"

Mitchell agrees that coincidences are possible, considering the size of the Web. "One thing I have learned over the years of being on the Internet is that any good, new idea can occur to several people independently. Just searching around now I also ran into Netbullseye that appears to have been created independently in 1997!"

Even during its peak, One Hit Wonders didn’t quite gain the kind of popularity that Googlewhacking enjoys now. The reason for this is the frenzied referrals to the game among webloggers.

Chris Sherman, Associate Editor of Search Engine Watch, agrees: “I'm not certain Googlewhacking is popular in an absolute sense, though it seems to be among Google cognoscenti… I am positive that most of the buzz was generated by blogs and then by journalists who track blogs for ideas.”

Rediff Guide to the Net caught up with both inventors:

* Andrew Mitchell, One Hit Wonders

How did you hit upon the idea of One Hit Wonders?
It started in the honours thesis lab in the School of Mathematics at the University of New South Wales in 1996. It was nearing the end of the day and a group of us were becoming too tired to work and waiting for some more friends to finish before going out to dinner. I was searching the Web on AltaVista (the best search engine of the time) and ended up with just three results. I had never seen less than a screen-full of matches before. Nor had any of my friends. So began the search for searches that had just one match.

Scoring in the Games One Hit Wonder: "Obviously anyone could pick a rare word, search for it, pick another rare word on one of those pages and receive exactly one hit for the combination, so some scoring system is required which rewards a player for the commonality of his words. Hence a harmonic-mean scoring method applied... (with every result), AltaVista gives the word count for each word (we'll call them count1 and count2). The score is calculated by... (2 x count1 x count2) / (count1 + count2)." Let's take an example. Andrew Mitchell himself tops the scores with 371,279 for his query '+windowmaker +asthma' (without the quotation marks). The score was calculated thus: 2 x 217,917 (hits for windowmaker) x 1,253,318 (hits for asthma) divided by (217,917+1,253,318). Googlewhacking: All Whacks have to be found on dictionary.com. No word lists allowed. For many players of this game, the scoring is not important, the search and discovery itself are satisfying. To score your whack search for the words separately and multiply their result tallies. Gary Stock, however, has devised a unique method of scoring a whack, with a maximum of three points: One for a pure whack, one for learning something new, and one for having fun while whacking.

If you were to look for words that only appear on the Web once or twice in themselves (that is very rarely used words), the task would be quite trivial… so the aim became to find fairly common words, which when taken together, matched the criteria.

The game became quickly addictive as the more common a word is in a One Hit Wonder, the stranger a combination seems… The combinations of 'mafia topologies', 'phosphate Starcraft' or a 'haemoglobin jeep', for example are somewhat humorous as the pairs formed are anti-related… you just wouldn't expect to see them together.

Some of us set up Web pages on the topic. We noted that when AltaVista found our pages, the One-Hit Wonders would no longer be 'one-hit wonders' as they would have two hits.

How popular was the game?
The site is averaging about 7,000 visitors per month at the moment. At last count, over 160,000 visitors had visited the strange world of One Hit Wonders. We certainly did not envisage it being that popular back in 1996. Over the years quite a few Web sites have listed the site as their link-of-the-day. Initially visitors just stumbled across it (through searches on search engines) and some linked to it from their pages. From there it just grew.

I have had emails from schoolteachers who have used games from the site to help teach children how to search the Web. It's amazing that such a silly way to waste an afternoon at university can actually turn out to be useful. It must be some of the most undirected 'research' ever to have been found useful.

I subsequently added a few more games, but One Hit Wonder remained the most popular.

What do you think about Googlewhacking? How is it different from One Hit Wonders? From what I can tell, it is basically the same as the first version of One Hit Wonders… (The scoring for the two games is different, see box). Our scores were based on the commonality of the words, I guess, a numerical equivalent of the dictionary used in Googlewhacking.

The core of the games is really the same, trying to think of words that are anti-related, which is fun and addictive.

Do you feel disappointed by media reports ignoring your contribution?
To be honest, until you emailed me I had never heard of Googlewhacking! Now that I've done a search there do seem to be quite a few articles about Googlewhacking and none of them mention the One Hit Wonders.

In a way I am a little dissapointed, but in the CNET article Gary Stock declined to take credit for the phenomenon... " 'All I did was come up with the term Googlewhack,' he said modestly". So it doesn't seem like he is "stealing" the credit.

On the other hand, it’s great to see the game, invented in its original form in 1996, still being so popular, and indeed increasing in popularity. I certainly don’t feel in competition with Googlewhacking.

Why do you think it has become such a popular game?
Googlewhacking/One Hit Wonders is very addictive. I guess it is the combination of a competition and the strangeness of the combinations that result.

Does this kind of a game have any real research value?
Not really that I can think of. Some teachers have used the game (and other search engine games) to help students learn about the Web. Perhaps linguists and people researching computer linguistics may find uses for the data collected. In general I'd imagine that linguists can learn a fair bit by querying search engines. It would be an easy way, for example, to find the most common words that can be spelled in more than one way… or to measure the commonality of various phrases and perhaps in which countries they are most in use.

What did you learn from your experience with One Hit Wonders?
I guess I learned several things… A search engine is a tool that can be used for much more than searching the Web for relevant pages. It is a database of what can be found on the Web. Since 1997 I've used it as my dictionary (I'm an atrocious speller) when I need to spell words correctly.

I have also learned that you can just put a Web site, and link to it from another page… and if the concept is popular, you will end up with hundreds of thousands of visitors, even without the help of a traditional-type of media outlet. Many people have a lot of spare time to spend on the Web!

*Gary Stock, Googlewhacking

What do you attribute the soaring popularity of Googlewhacking to?
It gives people a goal, no matter how small, and a method to reach that goal. Each of us has as good a chance as anyone else and we can look for peculiar words that interest us, personally. Googlewhacking has all the positive aspects that a 'competition' should have (a challenge, fun, a sense of sharing and 'winning'), with none of the negative aspects that are increasingly common today (a fight, opposition, a sense of taking and 'losing').

Look up 'compete' at dictionary.com: [Late Latin competere, * to strive together *, from Latin, to coincide, be suitable: com-, com- + petere, * to seek *; see pet- in Indo-European Roots.] My college Latin dictionary says "to coincide, come together, meet; to be adequate, be suitable..." It should mean, "to seek with, or strive together". More and more, it has come to mean "to take from, or strive against". No wonder the world is in such a condition! Make Googlewhack, not war :-)

Does Googlewhacking have any value at all in terms of research? Or is it merely a sport?
It certainly has value to the people who learn more about Web search and search engines. A few lessons: 1. Be curious; patience will help you find what you want. 2. Be creative; a slightly different approach may succeed. 3. Be cautious; people publish many truly ridiculous things!

I've learned a lot by watching how and where the concept spread. This mechanism we call 'the Web' is remarkable!

Do you think the growing popularity of Web logs and in turn their potential for referrals is a contributor to the success of Googlewhacking as a sport?
Absolutely. Various blog writers and blog readers were submitting Googlewhacks to me within a day of my first mention and they passed it to one another. Most of those folks are interested in language, meaning and practical Internet use. So it's a perfect game to pique their interest.

Would Googlewhacking have been as popular without Web logs?
Yes, among people who tried it. However, more people tried it (sooner) because members of the blog community trust one another to point out interesting topics. Notice too that blog writers often use valuable Googlefactors (weird words :-) to name their blogs - and even their topics day to day. See this page for about 13,000 examples!

Did you expect such popularity and coverage for the game?
Not at all. If I had, don't you think I'd have created a logo and written a business plan?!? :-)