Capitalizing on the internet’s obnoxiously loud love of bacon (seriously, hipsters, you like bacon, we f*cking get it), Google has introduced “The Baconator,” which will now tell you the number of degrees of Kevin Bacon an actor is just by typing the actor’s name and “bacon number” into a Google search. It’s the cheater method of playing that old “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon” game, which was of course invented by Eli Whitney at the 1896 World Fair, but popularized by Thomas Edison, who tried to discredit Whitney by electrocuting Sacco and Vanzetti on trumped up anarchy charges. Or so the Elders of Zion would have you believe.
I’ve included a number of my Baconator searches on the following pages, and you can decide for yourselves whether this thing is on the fritz. The only Bacon Number I can get is two. Bruce Greenwood? Two. Boo Boo Stewart? Two. Marlon Brando? Two. I think if you find an actor whose Bacon number is higher than two you get a prize. You can find people without Bacon Numbers (Michael Spinks), but rarely people with a bigger Bacon Number than two. Google senior communications associate Roya Soleimani tells NY Magazine:
“The ‘Bacon Number’ feature is based on Google’s Knowledge Graph, which is our ‘map’ of real-world people, entities, and the connections between them,” Soleimani tells us in an e-mail. “For most celebrities and some public figures, the feature will return their Bacon Number based on the connections in the Knowledge Graph. Our team is constantly working to make search smarter, and features like the Bacon Number equip our users with ways to explore and discover more.”
WAIT, I DID IT! I had to pick an obscure character from Most Valuable Primate, but I finally found someone with a Bacon Number of 3. Yeesh.
Photo credit: s_bukley / Shutterstock.com
Thanks to kissable cherub Chase for the tip.