The Rarest Words
Uh oh, Internet, looks like we’ve got a mystery on our hands. Lately I’ve been getting a little bit of traffic from a website called therarestwords.com, which bills itself as a “linguistic experiment,” but does not say anything about who’s running the experiment or why, even going so far as to say they are “[n]ot sponsored or affiliated with anyone (or any company) you might know. No, really.” There’s no contact info, no info at all, except:
The project TheRarestWords.com is created as an entertainment/experiment kind of thing. It shows the words that are rarely and extremely rarely used in sites. For now we are at stage 1 - compiling a big word-list to refine the results.
Man I can’t wait to see stage 2, which I suspect might be “?” at this point. I’m skeptical about the amount of “linguistics” going on here: there are ads on the site-specific pages (for “Search Engine Optimization” no less), and it may be that the scam is just to link to every website in the world with pages containing statistically improbable words, thus—I don’t know—gaming the Internet somehow. I’m not a scumbag SEO, so I don’t follow the latest theoretical assholery in that particular field. I would ask the site owners myself (or have Mike the linguist do it), but after a quick whois search, it really doesn’t look like these guys want to be found. Why would a linguistics experiment register through Domains By Proxy?
Anyway, it’s pretty cool, scams aside. You can type in a site’s url after the web address (ex. therarestwords.com/mxrk.net) to see what kinds of rare, rarer, and common words that site contains. My site’s really rare words include: longingly, listenability, uselessness, insofar, and scatalogica. If that’s not a pretty good summary of the kind of reading experience I’m crafting for you, I don’t know what is.
Sorry Wishydig and Rands, no soup for you yet.
P.S. If you dig on this kind of mystery, might I refer you to my spam hunt a few months back.
Mxrk
This is getting interesting. Two different bot tracking sites link RarestWords’ webcrawler (RarestParser) to Amazon Web Services. I’m not sure if that’s a smoking gun or not.
Mxrk
Well, after going dark for a few months, it looks like The Rarest Words is back, but without the SEO ads, and using a new registrar to block their whois info. Also, it looks like most of their old data hasn’t been migrated (there’s no data for my site yet, even though it was on the old site).
All in all, the new iteration feels significantly different. The copy is far less personable, and makes no claim to be “linguistic” or “experimental.” Still pretty mysterious though.
Reader Comments (5)
I can't be too disappointed. I'm one of the words on your list.
Okay, this one caught my interest, and I had to try. My own site isn't listed yet...but I thought I'd go straight to the heart of the matter. I mean...dictionary.com?
# perfervid
# igoogle
# cleverkeys
# lexico
# antonyms
# negocio
# facebook
# widget
# synonyms
# solver
# toolbar
Hope you don't mind my stopping through. Found you on the title list over at Metaxu Cafe and wanted to see what the post was about...
DNW
Apparently it doesn't deal with Blogger sites. If I try to search for my personal domain (marccsantos.com), I get a pleasant "haven't found you yet"; if I search for my blogger account, I get a ho-hum 404 page.
Hey, David, the more the merrier. Great idea with dictionary.com. I see that they also haven't analyzed (or won't analyze) Amazon or Wikipedia.
Santos, I noticed that about the blogger pages, but Mike has his own url pointing to his blogspot, so I wonder if he'll get a tap. They appear to be on the letter "O" right now, so he's a way off.
They are tracking my website. I went to the link and saw the same thing you did. Very odd. I can't imagine why anyone would care how often I use certain words or if those words are popular or not... except maybe my editor:))). Mysterious, indeed.