GGG has been running for 2 month. we have published 50 GGG-strips.
thats 23 3-word-strips, 23 4-word-strips, and a few odd ones. monkeypunk [3] and Phlow [2], silverfang and TOmaxwell have suggested or contributed GGG-strips, the others were done by yours truely…
all of the puzzles have been solved – by a total of 14 people.
a few people have played for awhile and then dissappeared, others have stuck around quite some time…
here is how it breaks down:
phlow: 13
cory: 9
rrothechild VII: 5
worthy_m & monkeypunk: 4 each
Josella: 3
Jack, wurzeltod, RRT & habi 2 each
another road side attraction, Padd, Steve & Scott Tarpley: 1 each
now, if google would finally come around and see the beauty of this game and start to sponsor it, we would now proceed to hand to the top 3 players their hard-earned google shares… he he
[anyone has good connections to google and could line this up?]
here’s my favorite answer to a strip so far: this was an answer to strip: GGG031: 3 words 15. to this Anonymous answered: “A Cat”
awwwwww, thats sooo cute, no?
the search-engine-situation: around july 1. images.google.com has started to behave strangely. to put it mildly…
while before the result pages were very stable and reliable, now they seem to switch around more often.
this has made the game almost impossible at times, more of a lottery.
one problem is, if you’re trying to solve older GGG-strips, they wont check out any longer.
from what i observed, this is what seems to happens:
for any given search term there appear to be 2 sets of results pages.
these get switched every few hours or so. some images appear on both result pages.
for the sake of the game to work well, it would have to be these common images, that get used to make the GGG-strips.
but sometimes this is not possible for various reasons: the image is a give-away – it’s only a thumpnail leading to a dead link – no one image appears in both sets of results – its much more time consuming to make a GGG-strip.
and there is a more serious problem: every set amounts of days [have not figured that interval yet] google does a major re-shuffle of the search results, after which older GGG-strips do no longer check out.
i am not sure what to do. sometimes i am tempted to give up. also because i am slowly running out of ideas for new puzzles.
i need some feedback, please…
what can we do about the image.google.com problem?
shall we keep going anyway?
will more people start to contribute puzzles? please?
what should we, could we, change, make better, stop doing?
at any rate, i am quite pleased about this project. it was featured under yahoo new additions [maybe that pissed google off?] and quite a few blogs mentioned it.
i would also be interested to find out how people found the game?