Google search can be helpful in many ways: obscure trivia facts, book summaries (including insightful commentary), song lyrics, Justin Bieber news. Now it can give you the Bacon Number for anyone!.
A Bacon number refers to the trivia game “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon,” where you try to connect different actors to Kevin Bacon via the films they have both appeared in. For example, Morgan Freeman starred in “Wanted” with James McAvoy. McAvoy was in “X Men: First Class” with Kevin Bacon, therefore giving Freeman a Bacon number of two.
To search, just type “Bacon number” and an actor’s name into the Google search bar. You will then get a number with the actor’s connection to Bacon (go ahead, well wait)
The Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon trivia game was invented in 1994 by three college buddies, Craig Fass, Brian Turtle and Mike Ginelli, who were snowed in at their college dorm, watching Kevin Bacon movies and drinking.
Similarly, the Bacon number was added to Google search by a few bored employees (no word from Google on whether they were drinking).
Was this addition to Googles search results a wise use of Googles resources? Not to worry. Google rakes in about a billion dollars per month. They also have over 50,000 employees, and almost 50,000 piles of $1,000,000 lying around (go ahead, well wait), so spending the time and money necessary to add the Bacon number to search results did not hurt their bottom line much.
