The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #43919   Message #644579
Posted By: Jim Dixon
07-Feb-02 - 11:57 AM
Thread Name: BS: New Game: Googlewhacking!
Subject: RE: BS: New Game: Googlewhacking!
We have a problem here. It seems that if one of your 'words' is hyphenated, like 'Neo-Onotological' (WYSIWYG's entry), or 'poorly-conceived' and 'whore-mongering,' (Anahootz's entries) there may be an inconsistency between the way Google treats it and the way dictionary.com treats it. In all three of these cases, it's clear that Google is treating the hyphenated term as one word, as shown by the fact that 'poorly conceived rubberneckers,' as 3 words, gets several more hits. But dictionary.com is treating 'poorly-conceived' as two words, as shown by the fact that there is a break in the underlining. If you click on 'poorly' you will get the definition of 'poorly' and if you click on 'conceived' you will get the definition for 'conceived.'

This is not the case for 'bashi-bazouk' (Mrrzy's entry), where the continuous underlining shows that dictionary.com recognizes 'bashi-bazouk' as one word. And indeed, if you click on 'bashi-bazouk' you will get the definition.

So we may have to disqualify those 3 entries on a technicality. But I await an official ruling from the judges.