First number not in Google? (2008) | Hacker News Reader

First number not in Google? (2008)

godplaysdice.blogspot.com

46 pointsnikolaypavlov24 comments

I remember having what I thought was a brilliant idea of the time of squatting iPhone domains a decade in advance - clearly there was no way I was getting in on the next, but maybe iphone6 wasn't taken... (this was when the current was four).

Anyway, at the time the lowest one available was iphone36.com. I didn't register it. It's taken now, no idea how high you'd have to go now.

It's harder if you count like Microsoft:

1, 360, 1

or like apple:

0, 3g, 3gs, 4, 4s, 5, 5C, 5s, 6

or like valve: 1, 2, ... ummm... 1?

I thought the canonical Microsoft list was Windows:

1, 2, 3, 3.1, 3.1.1(for workgroups), 95, 98, 98SE, ME, XP, Vista, 7, 8, 8.1, 10

Most people using NT knew it as version 4. Some folks knew that Windows 2000 was version 5. After that, things got weird: Vista is 6 but Windows 7 is 6.1 and Windows 8 is 6.2: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/ms72...

Windows 10 will finally (but perhaps temporarily) undo this weirdness, and report itself as version 10, but only to some applications! http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/11/why-wi...

People make money doing this sort of thing:

"In 2001 the McCarrigans secured the trademarks Super 13 through to Super 20 in anticipation of the expansion of the Super 12 competition."

More details here, including a couple of other trademarks they bought in anticipation:

http://www.nzherald.co.nz/sport/news/article.cfm?c_id=4&obje...

I dink around in SEO a lot because I find it fascinating, fun and occasionally profitable. As a fun anecdote, at one point I wrote a ridiculously sarcastic post about "how to rank #1 on Google" and held the number one position for that query for at least a year. [1]

A long time ago, one of my friends came to me saying "When I googled for a picture of a bird wearing a tucked in shirt, I couldn't find anything!"

Clearly this tragedy needed a remedy, so I MSPainted a shirt onto a bird, tucked neatly into its little belly and plopped it onto my blog [2] with most of the SEO best practices check boxes filled in. Since it was of so little value and competition it took about three days for it to rank number one for "bird wearing a tucked in shirt" - My friend thought I was a wizard, telling her coworkers of my mystical powers and ability to manipulate the internet. "You have very powerful friends" her boss would proclaim.

Point of this story? Well, there isn't really one.

Unfortunately, I broke my blog a few months ago in a host migration resulting in a crash for all my useless rankings. The image was lost in that migration as well... Perhaps someone else can provide the world with an image of a bird wearing a tucked in shirt it so desperately needs.

[1] Here's the now broken post for anyone curious - http://stentontoledo.com/blog/how-to-rank-1-on-google-guaran...

[2] http://stentontoledo.com/blog/a-bird-wearing-a-tucked-in-shi...

I was once tasked with reviewing our company website,and my first recommendation was adding a list of happy clients (with links to their sites), for a variety of reasons.

The next week I was able to announce to the team that we now ranked #1 on Google (cue applause) ... for some random phrase I compiled by using words in client names. I figured it was a good lesson for them that "#1 on Google" is not a goal in and of itself; you need to rank for something that matters.

Your bird with a tucked in shirt is a brilliant example, so thanks.

In the artwork "The Secret Lives of Numbers"[1] by Golan Levin, et al. from 2002, scraping AltaVista with Perl for the numbers 0 to 1,000,000 returned results for every number (otherwise I'm sure this would be mentioned in the report[2]). So at least 7 figures have been omnipresent on the web for the last 12+ years.

[1] http://flong.com/projects/slon/ [2] http://flong.com/storage/pdf/reports/webnums_report.pdf

There's a similar game in which you ask "what is the smallest positive integer that doesn't have a dedicated Wikipedia page?"

And then you can ask what happens when that number gets its own Wikipedia page...

This is known as the interesting number paradox: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interesting_number_paradox

From there, the description of the Berry paradox is good for a laugh: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berry_paradox

I was going to cite that if nobody else did; I didn't realize it had its own Wikipedia page.

N is the smallest number without a wikipedia page. A page is created to document this fact. N+1 is now the smallest number without a wikipedia page.

But if you created the page for N, that was its only feature of notability. If you create a page for N+1, N is now no longer notable. But that means also means that N+1's page is both inaccurate and not notable, and so it must be deleted. N is now once again the smallest number without a wikipedia page.

So rather than creating an infinitely increasing set of pages, I think you end up toggling forever between N and N+1

I'm pretty sure being the smallest number without a Wikipedia page does not fit the Wikipedia notability criteria for an article, so the article for N would never be approved.

This is how you lose editing privileges.

(...either 2551 or 7563, depending on if you allow things like "7562 Kagiroino-Oka")

I think N would retain a Wikipedia page. When you add a page for N+1, you update the page for N to include a history section: "N was the smallest number without a wikipedia page, until December 8, 2014, when N+1 became the smallest number without a wikipedia page."

There is no particular reason to think that N+1 does not have a wikipedia page. The next page without a number might be, I dunno, N+3454327.

That's true, but doesn't actually change my logic at all

While there is no proof that this is the smallest number, you can find an rough upper bound by shedding digits

After a couple minutes of playing I worked it down to 210000041821 before getting bored.

A tenth of this and you are in telephone number space. Numbers a bit smaller than this and you are in valid parcel tracking numbers. Either Google indexing this page or more packages being sent will eventually invalidate this post.

This makes me wonder if finding short strings with no/few search results and getting ranked for them all could lead to some free traffic from Google. Shotgun SEO?

This site doesn't help: http://www.integernumber.com/

Well, let's find out. I came up with 35949340184

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