M.I.A.'s album "/\/\/\Y/\" is ungoogleable

http://www.hipsterrunoff.com/2010/05/did-m-i-a-eff-up-by-giving-her-album-an-un-google-able-name.html

by sublemonic • 16 years ago

29 40 16 years ago

$Preview of M.I.A.'s album "/\/\/\Y/\" is ungoogleable$ hipsterrunoff.com

pook• 16 years ago

Chrome's Translate feature has let me down.

What language is the comment thread in?

jessor• 16 years ago

It's quite a problem. I'd really appreciate if google could just let me search for strings i put in quotes exactly the way they are.

Recently I wanted to google stuff about the windowmanager i3. It was quite difficult, even with queries like "i3 windowmanger".

unwind• 16 years ago

Uh ... I just tried it, but without the (hopefully typo:ed) misspelling you cited.

I get two hits, and the second goes to http://i3.zekjur.net/ which seems to be the home of i3.

This is the search I used: http://www.google.se/search?q=%22i3+windowmanager%22.

So that seems to be working fine, at least now.

dhs• 16 years ago

+1. Case in point: Today I was thinking about a problem: "Maybe I need a something like a "reduce-map" function here; maybe that would be the right metaphore for what I want the program to do here." I wanted to know whether this thought had any currency, so I googled program "reduce-map":

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=program+%22reduce-m...

And got back a slew of map-reduce tutorials.

Still don't know whether that "reduce-map" idea is a dead end.

david• 16 years ago

yeah, it's pretty hard to google anything nowadays without resorting to plus signs everywhere.

leftnode• 16 years ago

In the long run, this probably won't matter, people will just search for "mia new album" and find it just fine.

tom_ilsinszki2• 16 years ago

At best it will not matter that much, but it will not help spreading the news.

How will people search for the album after the next one comes out? "Mia album previous"

I think this is when cool gets in the way of usability.

(On the other hand, I am talking about the album right now, so if this was a marketing stunt, to get geeks talk about M.I.A, than it worked)

JoeAltmaier• 16 years ago

5th hit

rbrcurtis• 16 years ago

or mia maya

anedisi• 16 years ago

i'll google my new album. upss.

DeusExMachina• 16 years ago

Does n e 1 know how google works?

It took me a while to understand that "n e 1" is actually "anyone".

ErrantX• 16 years ago

We are spoiled here on HN.

Sometimes this "txt spk" makes my eyes bleed :(

coderdude• 16 years ago

It's somewhat shocking that people write like this nearly everywhere. Tech sites and even many astronomy sites are no exception (e.g., Wired or Astronomy Now).

mambodog2• 16 years ago

You know what's worse than that? People using 'nyt' for the word 'night' (ie. 'last nyt'). At least n-e-1 actually phonetically resolves to something sounding like 'anyone'. In my mind, 'nyt' would be 'nit' (or maybe nyit?).

On the other hand, if you have to include the spaces, 'n e 1' only saves you one keypress, so its also pretty damn stupid.

DrJokepu• 16 years ago

It is Hipster Runoff we're talking about and using "textspeak" is part of the blog's "brand" as well as abusing quotation marks. It not something you would expect to find on HN's frontpage but it is the number one alternative music blog for a reason.

mmelin• 16 years ago

"Can M.I.A. call the Google CEO and tell him to ‘index her shit’? Does n e 1 know how google works? Is there like an old guy who has to go through a file cabinet 2 find results for you every time you search for something?"

So the author knows what SEO stands for, but doesn't know the answer to this? Please. My impression is that this guy is intentionally trying to downplay his knowledge to avoid being labeled a "computer geek" by the hipsters in his audience.

ottbot• 16 years ago

I don't think this is his intention at all. You can't take HRO remotely seriously.

This is simply the tone/style of his writing, read more of the blog - it's all just a joke/satire.

lini• 16 years ago

On the plus side - an artist can be sure that piracy of their badly named album will also be low, since people won't be able to find it in the torrent search engines as well.

pmiller2• 16 years ago

Sigur Ros put out an album a few years back titled (). Yes, an empty pair of parentheses. It took me forever to even find a store that carried it because searching web sites couldn't hope to get any result.

I did eventually find a copy, though.

Edit: Hah, zero Google results, period! How's that for un-Googlable?

jjs• 16 years ago

    *  (latest-album 'sigur-ros)
    
    NIL

mambodog2• 16 years ago

You should have tried googling for 'sigur ros parentheses'.

shawndumas• 16 years ago

^ google-fu -- red sash awarded! eighteen terms of googshu completed.

robotron• 16 years ago

You should have created a news article on it that took over the blogogogosphere.

tom_ilsinszki2• 16 years ago

M.I.A.'s album is also "untorrentable".

laktek• 16 years ago

Really? That made me LOL!

tzury• 16 years ago

However, '"/ / / Y/" album' does work as well as "/\/\/\Y/\ new album"

seems like "\" of each "\/" is treated as escape character

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=/\/\/\Y/\+new+album

and

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=/+/+/+Y/+album

sounddust• 16 years ago

You forgot the word "new" in your second search, which is why you get different results. Those characters are being entirely ignored. You get the exact same results by searching for "Y new album"

matthias• 16 years ago

this reminds me of Super Discount 2 released by Etienne De Crecy in 2004. He named each track after a p2p client, thereby search-obscuring the titles.

1. Poisoned 2. Fast Track 3. Grokster 4. Morpheus 5. Bit Torrent 6. Audio Galaxy 7. G2 8. Soul Seek 9. Gifted 10. Limewire 11. Overnet

ddrager• 16 years ago

I don't think this will have much impact on sales. You can just search for M.I.A.

It's because mysql_real_escape_string, which many sites use, escapes all \ with /\. So on many sites (not nessessarily Google, you will actually be searching for //\//\//\Y//\?

heyitsnick• 16 years ago

"Pick a band name that no one else has so that it will show up first in google ... Pick an album name that is a made up word that no1 has ever even typed ... Name a song after some phrase that will get you accidental google hits."

These 3 things together make no sense to me. On the one hand it's suggesting to pick unique band names and albums, and then suggesting to pick regular phrases for songs that might get "accidental" hits.

If there's a benefit to getting said accidental hits, wouldn't this work for a band name? Surely Grizzly Bear would benefit from this? And I don't htink it's a real issue if your band name isn't top of the list because you are competing with 'real bears'; people aren't going to give up finding you if you are 4th on the list, or they have to type "grizzly bear band" in the search instead.

goodside• 16 years ago

If enough people search for it, Google picks up on it and adds in some sort of override to the no-punctuation rule. This is why "C#" and "F#" return different results from "C" and "F", but "Z#" gets no such benefit. Other times the exceptions apply to broad patterns of letters, since any single letter with "++" appended will give specific results even if it's not the name of anything (try "y++"), but + signs are in general ignored ("+++what--is+happening--" gives the same results as "what is happening").

lwhi• 16 years ago

I reckon this is clever. It makes it far more difficult to illegally share the album.

JeffJenkins• 16 years ago

I was looking at issues with integrating Amazon's products into my job's website a few years ago and I ran into an album called: [+++++]. I'd link to it, but Amazon's search can't find it and I don't remember what category it was under

miguelpais• 16 years ago

It should be googleable on this version of google though:

http://www.google.com/webhp?hl=xx-hacker

slapshot• 16 years ago

I'll give $20 to the first AMAZON-listed band with a SQL-injection album name.

"'); DROP TABLE ARTISTS"

(Yes, #327)

kree10• 16 years ago

I can think of a couple bands with names that give zero results on google: "!!!" and "+/-".

Though ungoogleable, I see they are "amazonable".

harshpotatoes3• 16 years ago

Searching for "plus slash minus" does bring up correct results. So does searching "chk chk chk" (i don't know why people call them this, I haven't heard of the band until today, but amazon told me this was a related search so I tried it on google).

harshpotatoes3• 16 years ago

more than likely people will just search for: MIA maya album.

I think something similar happened with a few smaller bands back in the p2p days who tried to make themselves 'unsearchable' and therefore 'unpirateable'. Pirates always find a way.

harshpotatoes3• 16 years ago

Case in point: searching for "plus slash minus" to find the band "+/-"

M.I.A.'s album "/\/\/\Y/\" is ungoogleable

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