The Google Search Game

A friend and I were messing around with Google the other night, and we ended up creating what I think is a really fun game. In fact we had so much fun doing it, I thought it would be selfish just to keep this game to ourselves, and that I had a duty to share it with the world.

So here it is:
Write an unfinished sentence. (We were using “Jamie is a(an)—“, but you can write anything you like.) People then take turns completing the sentence with different endings, and then googling it, in quotation marks, to see if that exact phrase is somewhere on the web. (You could also complete the beginning of sentences, like “— is a dangerous activity” or something.)

The goal is to get as few results as possible without actually getting zero. If you get zero results, the game is over and you lose. Otherwise, you write down the number of the results as your score for that round. (You’ll probably need pen and paper to keep score.)
You play for a pre-determined number of rounds. (We found 5 rounds worked nice with just two people.) If no-one actually goes bust (gets zero results) before the end of the game, then the person with the lowest score wins.

The game actually finishes pretty quickly, especially if someone gets zero results early on. So just to keep playing we started doing things like best 3 games out of 5, or best 5 games out of 7.
Initially we had the loser of one game go first for the next game, but if someone is having particularly bad luck this could cause them to have a run of several zero results right in a row. So the winner of each game goes first on the next game.

You could maybe also fool around with having the winner pick a new phrase for each game to keep things fresh. (Obviously it has to be something you can potentially put different endings on.) Although we were having pretty good results for our phrase, so we just stuck with the same phrase all the way through.

Also we were just playing with two people, but there’s no reason why you couldn’t expand this game to a bigger group. You may want to adjust the number of rounds depending on the size of the group.
With more than two people, if someone goes bust you can have a loser, but no clear winners. But that’s okay, there are other games that work like that (Jenga, for example). You could make it more interesting by having some sort of punishment for the loser.
Or you could just total up all the scores at the time someone goes bust, and have the lowest score at the time be the winner.

Probably a lot of other details and variations you can work out by yourself. Feel free to use this, run with it, and just change it up as you like. If you stumble upon any great improvements, let me know in the comments sections. But probably to a large extent the simplicity of this game is its beauty.

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To the best of my knowledge, this is a completely original idea. But it does almost seem a little bit too obvious. Odds are probably somebody out there thought of this before me. Has anyone else ever done something like this, or heard of something like this before?

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