Saturday, April 6, 2013

One Million Digits

This was a fun thing to do on the otherwise boring afternoon.

I was randomly surfing Quora when I received a notification on a question which I'd seen and followed for its humour a while ago and the answer goaded at my curiosity.

When I went to this particular website, the website challenged me to find the particular HTML page where the actual 1,000,000 digits were present. First the website, mockingly and tantalizingly told me to follow the index2.html and inde3.html URLs, which quite obviously didn't have the million digits.

Now, I was irked. A little Googling hack that I'd learned a while back came handy now. I copied the URL of the website, went to Google, and did this.
When searched with "intitle:index.of", Google displays indexed websites on servers which match the search query, and lo and behold, only one search result. After that, it was only matter of clicking the search result, opening the folder containing the website and viewing the 1 million digits.

Not a great accomplishment or anything, I know, but still, it was fun :D