iRadar: 7 Quick & Casual Games You Can Play On Google Search

7 Quick & Casual Games You Can Play On Google Search: "
google search games

Google Search and games don’t sound like the right match. It is difficult to imagine the vanilla plain Google homepage as an online game platform. But the six games that we saw can be played on Google Earth are proof of the fact that Google has more uses than the obvious.

Of course, Google Search does not have the eye candy of Google Earth but if you can look beyond that, there are some quick games that are based on Google Search. Most of these games are built around search queries.

Call them teasers or timewasters but they can addictively grow on you. But the best thing is that being based on Google, these free online games are virtually ‘office proof’; easily accessible and free from office network constraints.

These seven casual Google games could be just the thing when you are bored with the drudgery of using search engines for their normal everyday use. Try them out for a round or two.

Pacman

It started its life as a doodle to celebrate PAC-MAN’s 30th birthday. It ended up ‘wasting’ a combined 4,819,352 hours and $120 million worth of lost time. It wasn’t just a static doodle but one you could play with by ‘inserting’ a coin. The Pacman game on Google became so popular that it now has a permanent home. PAC-MAN remains timeless.

Gwigle

The Gwigle Game involves guessing the search query by looking at the results. The one hint you get is through the number of question marks that correspond to the characters of the query. Answering correctly takes you up the levels.

The puzzle game also throws up questions from Google Maps, Images and other Google apps like the calculator. That makes the upper levels increasingly difficult. The hints given alongside also point to the different ways to search using Google.

A similar query guessing game can be played at What Did I Search For?

GoogleWhack

The trick is to find a query made up of two words (without quotes) that returns exactly one result. Any pure word 4 to 30 characters in length qualifies for the Whack. There are some rules which you can check out on the site. The site also has a collection of user-submitted Googlewhacks.

The game is a real brain twister because of the uniqueness of the words that have you have to think up and also the fact that the Googlewhacks as unique search words are short lived (when published and indexed, the word will show up more than once in the search results). Googlewhack is in fact quite a popular web sport.

Googlefight

Think of it as a face-off between two keywords. The one that returns the highest Google search results is the winner. Two animated stick figures fight onscreen after the keywords are entered, and then a bar graph shows the comparative results. Check out the classic fights from the little sidebar to see some funny comparisons. Darth Vader is clearly more popular.

Guess-the-Google

Guess-the-Google is similar to Gwigle but instead of words, it’s based on Google Image Search. At the start a grid of 16 images appear. The trick is to guess the common keyword that links all these 16 similar images. And you have 20 seconds to do it in. The game has 10 fun rounds and you can quickly go through it within a few turns of the clock. You get bonus time points too.

On the same page you will find the link to play Montage-a-Google. This is a fun and colorful game on Google Image Search. Using an image search query, the tool lets you create colorful montages in a second. You can download the montage to your desktop.

Google Image Labeler

Google Image Labeler is less of a game and more of a way for Google to improve Google Image Search with some user contributions. It can be played with a partner and that makes it a bit more fun. The game gets one for you if anyone is online and free. You get the same set of images and then have to give the images as many labels as you can think of.

The more precise the label, the more points. Bonus points go to you if your label matches with your partner. The games are timed, so you have to hurry along. Do well and your name gets to be on the leaderboard.

Google Image Quiz

You get three guesses for getting what the images are all about. The images are displayed randomly using Google Image Search but they have a common connection. It’s a quick brain exercise.

Occasionally Google launches games which are actually promotional tools. We had the one for The Da Vinci Code and then we had the job of tracking down Jason Bourne (The Bourne Ultimatum).

Then there was another one brought out by Google Book Search last year. Although the contest is officially over, you can still take the The 10 Days in Google Books quiz. One thing is pretty definite, Google always has something around the corner.

Do you know of any other Google Search games that you can play? Which is the one you head to for some quick and casual fun?

Image Credit: pineapplebun

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