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You can't google 9999999..99999999999999999999999

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Re: You can't google 9999999..99999999999999999999999

#61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sweet, now someone just has to get into my google account settings and I'm screwed.

I imagine this is why the parent poster mention enabling two-factor authentication first.

Sweet, now someone has to get into parent's google account AND swipe his phone!

Re: You can't google 9999999..99999999999999999999999

#62
post #59

I think this question is cool to think about and try to answer: What is the lowest integer that doesn't have any hits on google? Is there any reasoning that can help estimating the approximate magnitude it should be?

A problem might be that as soon as you discover that number, you can't tell anyone on the web about it. This for example has no results as of now: http://google.com/search?q=813115181452319

As of now, it has 3 results (all 3 pointing in some way or the other to your own remark). Damn. That was fast!

Re: You can't google 9999999..99999999999999999999999

#64

On a faintly related note, I once was calculating partitions, using a relatively inefficient method (memoization: if f(n,k) is the number of distinct ways to express n as the unordered sum of integers no greater than k, then f(n,k) = f(n-k,k) + f(n,k-1)). My computer started to feel the strain in the thousands (this algorithm is O(n^2) in space and time). I then googled for the partition of, say, 1034, which is: 9136…

Ridiculous in what way? Ridiculously good compared to alternatives, or ridiculously complex or? Asking out of pure ignorance here.

See how http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentagonal_number_theorem strikes you ;-)

At the bottom there's a bit of Python code for the partition numbers, incidentally.

Re: You can't google 9999999..99999999999999999999999

#65
Probably that string was used as a dork together with some more text to find vulnerabilities on web applications or so. So it was reported as a honey

This does look like a string that could very much be generated by some poorly coded webbapp. An incorrect usage of a floating point number can easily generate such output. If it occurs on a critical part of an application it could very well been used as a dork. Just an hypothesis though.

Back in 2005 google tricks were at their peak. Many hackers experimented with search phrases in order to retrieve interesting/valuable/uncommon/dangerous?/sensitive info from the web. "index of/ .mp3" "apache server at port" being the absolute classic.

More and more people started to jump in the bandwagon, webmasters gradually became more aware of this, and google too. The natural reaction was google honeypot.

http://ghh.sourceforge.net/

But it wasn't too long until google started to remove such features. These days one can hardly search for symbols on google. They the old tricks, most of them will not work, google simply ignores the details and returns a list of results based on the actual words contained in the query. It's becoming a QA machine. That's one of the reasons I switched to duckduckgo.

For a proper reading on the subject check ou the vast website of the, now deceased, great hacker Fravia: http://www.searchlores.org/indexo.htm

Re: You can't google 9999999..99999999999999999999999

#66
post #12

The double dot indicates that this is a ranged query. 11..22 would be to search for all integers between 11 and 22. The effect is that the search is too broad. The problem is more likely to be that the range search is a mapreduce that performs a search for each item in the range. You can imagine why that's a bad idea, and some aggressive timeouts are probably what stop it from going too far. Plus the numbers in the r…

> The effect is that the search is too broad. The problem is more likely to be that the range search is a mapreduce that performs a search for each item in the range.

I'm a bit confused to see this so highly upvoted. I'm not sure you understand what MapReduce is for. MapReduce is not a technology designed for executing a search query in under 100ms, it's for massive data processing jobs. MapReduce is what you would use to do to prepare an index, not to query it.

> You can imagine why that's a bad idea, and some aggressive timeouts are probably what stop it from going too far.

As you yourself noted, this is blocked to prevent people from searching for SSN/credit card/etc. dumps.

Re: You can't google 9999999..99999999999999999999999

#67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sweet, now someone just has to get into my google account settings and I'm screwed.

I imagine this is why the parent poster mention enabling two-factor authentication first.

Are we too obsessed to ignore irony/humour?

Re: You can't google 9999999..99999999999999999999999

#69
post #37

Reading the comments here gave me an idea....google your own credit card numbers to check if its already in some scammer's index. While no results might not necessarily mean you are safe, a positive match is a clear red flag.

Better yet, do this several times per day -- see how long it takes to get your numbers into Google Suggest :)

Re: You can't google 9999999..99999999999999999999999

#70

I think this question is cool to think about and try to answer: What is the lowest integer that doesn't have any hits on google? Is there any reasoning that can help estimating the approximate magnitude it should be?

What's the lowest integer that will never have any hits on Google? It must exist by induction, I think.
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