What is Googlism?

Googlism is an amusing way of wasting ten minutes of time you’d otherwise spend reading your email. A better explanation from the official Googlism site itself is “Googlism.com will find out what Google thinks of you, your friends or anything!”

A bookmarklet is a snippet of code that adds or enhances a web

browsers functionality. They live in the same place as your bookmarks and allow easy access to tasks ranging from the trivial (resizing the browser window or turning images off) through to the more complex (running searches with whichever text you have highlighted as the search term or validating the html and links on the current page.)

If you use <acronym title="Internet Explorer">IE</acronym> then

you’re in luck, for once. All that’s required is to right click the link and select “Add to Favourites…” The bookmarklet will then be available under the “Favourites” menu on the toolbar. Alternatively you can left click and drag the link to the “Favourites” menu on the toolbar. When you add the toolbar IE will inform you that it may potentially be dangerous, while this is true (It is after all a code fragment) it should be simple enough to visually check the code for its purpose, after all bookmarklets aren’t exactly epic in size or complexity.

Adding a bookmarklet to Mozilla (and some versions of Phoenix/Firebird/Firefox, check your release notes) is no more complex but may require you to tweak your preferences to allow them to create new popup windows or take other similar actions. This is left as an exercise for the reader as different people will assign different amounts of trust and so the settings to be changed will vary.

Once you have the bookmarklet in your favourites/bookmarks menu to

activate it you simply highlight some text and then click on it. Your browser will then open a new window with the results. Hours minutes maybe whole seconds of fun!

These bookmarklets enable you to see what Google thinks about the

currently selected text. Due to the way that googlism works it’s a necessary evil (Until i can think of a better way)to have four different, but extremely similar bookmarklets. Googlism breaks its searches down into four general categories, Who, What, When and Where.

To find out the webs views on a person you should use this

bookmarklet with a name as the highlighted text:
Googlism – Who opens results in a new window.
Googlism – Who opens results in the current window.

To find out what people think about a brand, product or object you

should use this bookmarklet.
Googlism – What opens results in a new window.
Googlism – What opens results in the current window.

Use this bookmarklet with a place/location name as the highlighted

text to get the ‘dirt’ as it were:
Googlism – Where opens results in a new window.
Googlism – Where opens results in the current window.

To find out about a search dates, days or events. you should use

this bookmarklet with a date as the highlighted text, you should use dates in alphabetical form (February 19) rather than numeric:
Googlism – When opens results in a new window.
Googlism – When opens results in the current window.