elgooG

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

elgooG logo

elgooG is a mirror image (a horizontally-flipped version) of the Google search engine. The page and all results are displayed in reverse. The site is called the "google mirror" as a parody of the term mirror in computing, which usually refers to a copy or backup of another website. The site was created by a group called All Too Flat, who put up various comedy and satire pages on their website. To search on this search engine, you must type in the keywords backwards for it to understand what you are searching for.

[edit] Bypassing Chinese censorship

New Scientist Magazine reported in December 2002 that the site had become popular in China, where the locals were prevented from accessing the normal Google site and other popular search engines because of the Internet censorship practices of the Chinese government.^[1]

However, the elgooG mirror was not capable of handling variable-width character encodings or double-byte character encodings (including Big5, GBK/GB 18030/GB 2312, ISO 2022, and other character encodings used to encode the Chinese character set); many Chinese users were restricted to pages using encodings that use only a single byte per character such as ASCII, ISO 8859, and other ASCII extensions.