Dave Gorman - Dave Gorman’s Googlewhack Adventure
This isn’t the book I intended to buy. I went into Waterstone’s to buy a french dictionary, decided I wasn’t ready for one, started browsing the travel writing section, and ended up buying this.
Gorman is evidently prone to ‘adventures’ - before this one he’d been off on a project to find everyone in the world with the same name as him - as he’s distracted from writing a novel by “Googlewhacking”, a fad that swept the Internet a few years ago, helped not a little by this book. A Googlewhack is a two word search on Google which returns only a single web page. Dave Gorman made it his mission to find 10 of these “in a row”, by which he means the next Googlewhack is found by the owner of the web page which produced the last one. Since he is also required to meet these people, Gorman travels all around the globe in his mission, and it’s this which forms most of the interest in the book. The people Dave meets are interesting since they’re all so diverse, yet all (with one exception) have a willingness to find more Googlewhacks for him.
All tied together nicely by the authors witty commentary (I laughed out loud in several places), this is a charming tale of what can happen when you have someone with an unstoppable curiosity, tons of energy, and nothing to stop them…
Tags: books, Dave Gorman, Travel
