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January 22, 2004Happy Google Hacks Week 2004 #4: GoogleJackWhen I'm in "brainstorming ideas for hacks" mode, I come up with some weird ideas. I thought about a random password generator using Google, and then a "Google Hangman" game, and a few other things. I was falling asleep one night (okay, one early morning) when I thought, "Well, you could do a blackjack game." Google's API includes the ability to see the size of any given result's cache (if there is a cache.) Google doesn't index more than 101K of a site, so a given result will return a cache value of between 1K and 101K. Thus GoogleJack, with a score total of 101 instead of 21. You pick a word and give Google a word. Google searches and counts the cache size. You can "Hit," do the next search and add that result count to your cache size, or you can say you're done. Once you're done, Google counts the cache size of its keyword search result. Whoever gets the closest to 101 without going over wins. If you go over 101 you bust and you lose. You can change the 101 to something else if you want, but 101 works very well. You will need a Google API key to play this game. As always they are free and available at http://api.google.com. Big props to Ron Pacheco. He's been vetting my Perl scripts all week and answering my stoopid questions, but this one was a bit complicated for me and he smoothed it out and got it going. So play already! Try paired words like love/hate, ethel/lucy, wind/water, etc. GoogleJack!
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