ElgooG
- The title of this article is incorrect because of technical limitations. The correct title is elgooG.
elgooG is Google spelt backwards. If you type elgooG as a search string in the search engine at Google then top of the list comes back a link to [1]. The web site's producers call this a mirror site, but not in the usually accepted sense (see Mirror (computing)). In this instance you are presented with a web page that is a kind of mirror image of the Google web page: with the letters in reversed order, while the individual letters are normal. Also, search terms have to be typed in with the letters in reversed order. The search results link to the ordinary pages.
New Scientist Magazine reported this in December 2004, and also mentioned that the site had become popular in China, where the authorities have prevented locals from accessing the normal Google web site, but hadn't got round to filtering the elgooG site. Apparently large numbers of multilingual Chinese web-surfers have mastered operating their computers in mirror image, and can use this site to find material that they might not otherwise have access to. (As the page doesn't support Chinese coding, however, such users would be restricted to pages in languages that use the Latin alphabet.)
elgooG is the creative talent from one of the programmers at All Too Flat. In the elgooG FAQ, he says the following:
"It's a Google mirror. A common practice for busy websites is to create a mirror site, which is an exact replica of the original site but on a different server. This way if one server is really busy, you can go to the other server. elgooG is a play on this idea, except instead of an exact replica of the site, it's a mirror image of the site."
The Google Mirror has been featured in the following:
- St. Petersburg Times (July 15, 2002)
- Slashdot (#1) (#2) (Sept 8th, 2002 and Sept 12, 2002)
- Slashdot Japan (#1) (#2) (July 11, 2002 and Sept 9, 2002)
- Screen Savers Site of the Nite (July 12, 2002) on TechTV. AVI (5.7 MB) | Real (1.6 MB)
- New Scientist (#1) (#2) (Sep 2, 2002 and Dec 2, 2002)
- Aamulehti, the 2nd largest newspaper in Finland) (small 144KB | large 427KB)
- C-net wire (News.com, ZDnet, NY Times, Netscape News, and translated in France, Belgium, Taiwan, the Netherlands, Australia and Japan)
- Yahoo! news in the UK. The article was reprinted in ZDnet in the UK and Yahoo! News in France too. (September 12, 2002)
- IEEE Spectrum (October 2002)
- Google Hacks, O'Reilly Press
- ZDnet AnchorDesk Article (March 28, 2003)
- The "reflective" mood at Wild Mood Swings.