Finding random websites
Published: February 15, 2026
When I do translation I'll often perform "exact match" searches on Google. This is a good way to gauge how common an exact phrase is and to find the context in which people use certain expressions and idioms. This is to make sure what I write comes off as natural, and that I've got the meaning right.
But occasionally I'll see a result that makes me pause because of how unexpected the context is. I'll stop what I'm doing and go check the website out. It's sites I would never find under normal circumstances: hidden forums with decade-old posts, someone's blog with cryptic descriptions of their mental struggles, pages and pages of cult nonsense.
It's crazy to me how sometimes just a few words strung together can narrow down your search to only couple of websites from probably more than a billion, and how unexpected the results can be. I wonder if this is how somebody will visit this blog one day.