People are so fond of wordplay. After all, playing around with puns, alliterations, anagrams and other such activities exercises one’s mind. At the very least they’re good to pass the time, especially when you’re bored (which probably means you have no connection to the Internet).

But if you are connected, you might want to try some Google word games, and one of them is the Googledrome.

What’s a Googledrome anyway? It’s yet another game that Google enthusiasts play. It’s a play on the word “palindrome,” which means a word, phrase or sentence that is constructed such that it can be spelled forward and backwards and read the same thing. Such examples are “radar,” “straw warts” and the like. Palindromes are actually good pastimes for people who code software–the longest palindromes (spanning thousands of words).

The Googledrome, however, is a bit different. The contest is played by searching for words or phrases wherein both the original and the reverse would render the word on top spot in the results page. And it’s not necessary for them to read the same backwards. One good example is “Oprah.” Both searches for “Oprah” and “Harpo” would still bring up Oprah Winfrey’s site, because her production company is named “Harpo,” the reverse of her name. In this case, both are optimized (intentionally or otherwise) to point to oprah.com

Of course, palindromes are already automatically Googledromes, because of their reversible nature. However, finding something that’s not a palindrome, and has the same Google top result forward or backwards sure is a challenge, and could be fun if you’re into wordplay. I guess wordsmiths would find Googledrome hunting quite exciting.