by AMY BARRATT

It's Friday afternoon in London and Dave Gorman is trying to watch the Wimbledon men's semi-finals. Luckily for me, they're on a rain break when I call, so he's free to talk about his Just for Laughs show, Dave Gorman's Googlewhack Adventure.

Googlewhacking is an Internet pursuit, the object of which is to find a two-word search that, when entered into the Google search engine, yields a single result. Gorman found out about the pastime when a stranger contacted him to inform him that his Web site was a Googlewhack; it was the only hit for the words "francophile" and "namesakes."

"When you first find out about Googlewhacking," Gorman insists, "it's weird if you don't try to find one if you're sitting at a computer."

You're thinking about trying it right now, aren't you, dear reader? After talking to Gorman, despite the fear that it could become an all-consuming obsession, I decided to give it a shot myself. My first pathetic effort, "wimbledon" and "witch," yielded about 61,200 results. It took seven tries, gradually whittling down the number of results, to arrive at "edomites" and "didgeridoo." Although these two words led to a single site, it turned out to be a long list of random words, thus not a real Googlewhack.

After being told that his site was a Googlewhack, Gorman set about finding another one. When he did, he sent an e-mail to a contact number on the site ("Since I had been contacted that way, I thought that's what you do when you find a Googlewhack") and got in touch with a guy in Birmingham, England.

"A few months later," Gorman explains, "the guy was in London and he ended up at my place, sitting at my computer, looking for Googlewhacks. The one he found turned out to belong to someone I know in France. This struck me as an incredible, fascinating coincidence, since there are three billion sites on Google, and I don't have three billion friends."

Gorman contacted the friend in France to tell him about this coincidence, and the friend invited him over for a visit. It was this friend who first issued the challenge to get 10 Googlewhacks in a row. "I resisted getting caught up in this because I was meant to be writing a novel at the time," Gorman says.

Eventually, though, the appeal was too great for this quirky artist, best known for his British TV hit, The Dave Gorman Collection, which involved scouring the Earth for other people with his name.

Gorman enticed each person that he met through a Googlewhack to find him another, and then he would go and visit that person. He covered over 140,000 kilometres in three months, recklessly spending the advance for the novel he hadn't even started writing. The show, which he says has never been written down, is just Gorman telling the story of his travels, with visual aids.

Gorman has been racking up more air miles for the past year or so, sharing his Googlewhack Adventures with audiences from Melbourne to Edinburgh to Aspen. "Something stupid like 150,000 people have seen it," he says in a self-deprecating, British way. He doesn't enjoy doing the show in Britain anymore, where it feels as if everyone already knows the story, but "as long as people in foreign countries continue asking me, I'll keep going."

Dave Gorman'S Googlewhack Adventure opens July 13
as part of JFL at the Centaur Theatre (453 St-Francois-Xavier), $29.50, 288-3161

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