I'm not sure whether I'm taking too seriously something intended as a joke, but this in fact can conceivably be useful! When studying mathematical problems, sometimes you have a number that has some special meaning in your problem (e.g., the first value for which some phenomenon does not occur), you may be able to compute this number by brute-force or by ad-hoc reasoning, and if the number is high enough then someone else finding this number may mean that they are looking at the same problem as you. Since there's a canonical way to write numbers, but not a canonical way to define problems, then this can be helpful for these people to find each other.
An example of a similar phenomenon here https://a3nm.net/work/research/questions/#words-without-shuf... where someone interested in the sequence "abcacbacabc" is plausibly looking at the longest and lexicographically smallest ternary word without a shuffle square substring. Just searching for "abcacbacabc" on Google yields papers who look at this -- and two people independently coming up with the concept could find each other in this way if they write examples the same way even if they don't use the same words to define the concept.
(A related resource in maths is the OEIS https://oeis.org/ to see whether the integer sequence you came up with has already been studied or has another non-obvious reformulation.)
A more general approach are Encyclopedias of integer series. I think that works better than just focusing on single numbers. Hm. How many numbers are there, that are interesting, but not part of a series?
All of us use the same keyboards more or less, maybe us randomly typing a large number is not as random as we would like to think. Just like how “asdf”, “xcyb” are common strings because these keys are together, there has to be some pattern here as well.
Especially for those very large numbers in the top ten (like 166884362531608099236779 with 6779 searches), and the relatively small number of total "votes" (probably less than a million), I think the only likely explanation for their rank is ballot-stuffing.
That means there is less entropy than purely random strings, not that this specific number would be so far outside the distribution. My money would be on someone hammering it.
It seems that someone sequentially ran up to around 131k (at the moment), I can't get any lower new number. Also please restore the input when a database error occurs...
Readit News
Times are changing
An example of a similar phenomenon here https://a3nm.net/work/research/questions/#words-without-shuf... where someone interested in the sequence "abcacbacabc" is plausibly looking at the longest and lexicographically smallest ternary word without a shuffle square substring. Just searching for "abcacbacabc" on Google yields papers who look at this -- and two people independently coming up with the concept could find each other in this way if they write examples the same way even if they don't use the same words to define the concept.
(A related resource in maths is the OEIS https://oeis.org/ to see whether the integer sequence you came up with has already been studied or has another non-obvious reformulation.)
See most searched here: https://numberresearch.xyz/info