Prove to strangers that your Google-fu is strong.
And waste precious time doing it!
Welcome to Name That Autocomplete, the game that pits your pop culture knowledge against the billions of people who search Google every day. If you're new here, Give the game a try.
If you enjoy the game, you can register a user name to keep track of your progress in the game and rank your stats on the leaderboard.
New Stuff
Coming in the next day or so
Being able to watch how people play the game and tracking various statistics over the past few weeks has been great, and helped me come up with some new ideas. I'm currently working on a better system for automatically eliminating names from the game that have too many vague clues, so that the game will overall be more fun to play.
Cheating
Because some people insist on being dicks.
I've added in some new code to the game to prevent cheating. A few people realized that if you're stuck on a name you can't figure out, you can just intentionally cause an error or click "Play" in the top menu to move on to the next name. As of now, if you attempt this you'll be assigned an incorrect guess for that name and all of your streaks will be cut. Just don't cheat and it won't be a problem for you.
New Stuff
That has kept me up all night the past few days
- An avatar system for registered users, powered by Gravatar.com.
- A new and improved filtering algorithm to remove bad clues from the game.
- Lots and lots of new names, thanks to those of you who took the time to submit them.
- An extra secret achievement system, with unlockable rewards for top players.
- A bunch of backend stuff to ensure the site won't get borked once it goes live. You may not be able see it, but trust me, it's there.
A Note On Randomness
And how it relates to the game
I received a feedback message from a user related to how the game picks the name you will play. He's right, it's not very random. The way it works is that the game will give you the name that has been played least recently. What this means is that two people who start at the same time will receive the exact same name. This scenario will be much less likely once the game grows in popularity and more people play it simultaneously, but for now it might not work as well. Selecting names for people to play literally at random can cause problems, as it means some names may end up being played more often than others. Playing the least recently played name ensures that all names within the game have a roughly equal distribution of plays.
Update: This has been fixed. Every person playing the game will be given a unique name, no matter how many people are playing simultaneously