What’s Their Bacon Number? Let Me Google That For You
If you’ve ever wondered what someone’s Bacon number is, you now have to look no further than a quick Google search
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Kevin Bacon’s Bacon Number is 0. David Shankbone
The Google search bar can do math for you, convert units, tell you the weather, give you stock quotes, update your sports scores, oh, and search the web. And now the Google team has added another quick search function: the Bacon Number. Just search someone’s name followed by “bacon number” and you can find out how many degrees that person is from the famed Kevin Bacon.
Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon started as a project by a few college students at Albright College. The story goes that they were sitting around watching Footloose, and when the movie ended The Air Up There began to play next. This made them wonder just how many movies Kevin Bacon had been in. So they constructed the Bacon tree, and wrote to Jon Stewart of “The Daily Show” explaining the game and wound up on television, telling everyone about what had began as a party trick. Kevin Bacon, apparently, was not amused initially, although he has come to embrace the game and wound up writing the forward to the group’s 1996 book.
And now the game is immortalized in Google search bar history. Give it a try:
More from Smithsonian.com:
It’s a Small World After All: Six Degrees of Peggy Bacon
Big Data or Too Much Information?
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