Monday, July 4, 2016

Are you bored? Try Google Feud!

I don't exactly know how late I am to this party, but now I'm pretty hooked on it. What am I talking about? Google Feud, of course!



If you're like me, you grew up watching Family Feud on television. These days it's hosted by Steve Harvey, but I've known the show all the way back to it's first host, Richard Dawson. It's a game show where you have 2 families of 5 that compete against each other on survey questions presented by show itself. The game often surveys men and women in groups of 100. The family with the most points towards the end of the show wins, or if there is a tie there is a "sudden death" round. The winning family goes on to a special round called "Fast Money" where if 200 points is reached, they win $20,000 USD. On some promotions, if the same family wins 5 game shows in a row, they might win a car or some other item.

A site by the likes of googlefeud.com has cropped up recently that brings this popular game show (in a miniature form) to the internet, and it seems to be sweeping the internet by storm. The game works by presenting 4 categories: Culture, People, Names, and Questions. Choose a category, and the game will insert a partial search into the search box, and it's your job to guess the top 10 autocomplete searches.

As you can see from above, I clicked on "Culture" and got a response regarding Nickelback, which personally is an artist that I used to listen to often but is regarded by modern culture to be abysmal. This is just the (probably millions) of potential items you can respond to in this game.

Though, sometimes the results are a little questionable. I've seen "google feud" listed in some of autocomplete answers before, while you won't see such a thing when you try google.com in incognito mode (or your browser's private mode option), so that Google won't personalize your searches. It seems that Google Feud's answers are sometimes tainted with itself, which I hope doesn't become too much of a problem because it could ruin the fun of the game if the results actually don't align to Google's own.

Do you folks enjoy the game? I personally haven't spent too much time on it, but it does seem like a good time waster. Perhaps something a little more intelligent than playing Agario, perhaps?