Made out of people

Leslie Lamport tries to Googlewhack himself

I know from Google Unique. Or, at least, "google first", which seems to be good enough in this day and age. (Try it. "Google." "Danyel". I'm feeling lucky . Cool, no? Well, at least until the porn star, the novelist, or the folk musician catches up with me. Interestingly, the top hit is now the blog; it was--until recently--the home page .)

The microsoft conference was all about google-unique people. Shirky
as was Scoble and Kotamraju and danah and Weinberger .

(Um, search results subject to change without notice).

Anyway, Leslie Lamport writes (and I quote here with small, obvious changes):

This page can be found by searching the Web for the 23-letter string allXXXXXXpubsonXXXweb. Please do not put this string in any document that might appear on the Web-including email messages and Postscript and Word documents. One way to refer to it in Web documents is "the string obtained by removing the - characters from the string alllam-portspu-bsonth-eweb."

Now, so far it's worked. No one has tried any sort of google attack, and so he can guarantee uniqueness. But it seems a difficult problem, to say the least. When will some prankster find it, and submit it to Fark? He's trying for a universal name, something that will last through his job placements--but he causes himself other problems.

Not to mention that his preferred search method requires that a human hand-edit out a bunch of hyphens. Which loses out on usability.

I am reminded of the robust hyperlinks project (now concluded, ironically taken offline, and thus findable only through the internet archive). Essentially, the "robust hyperlinks" folks want to annotate hyperlinks with a couple of fairly unusual words. Those would help find other documents by indirect reference--by dropping them into a search engine.

I'm feeling kind of Ozymandius right now... What will the web look like in a few years? Will be we able to find anything at all, or will it all just have turned into offsite cobwebs? (Yes, the internet archive is grabbing all the static HTML. But what about webforms, and robots.txt-protected stuff, and flash, and all the rest?)

UPDATE: Er, that's Ozymandias. Fortunately, The Web can't spell either.