How to Identify a Catchphrase using Google

Catchphrases are all over the place. A quick Google search will reveal the origin and meaning of any catchphrase. ...So long as that's the original form. People just love to remix popular catchphrases, usually just changing one word at a time.

While reading an article in Wired called "The Giant Nerds of Sumatra," it just suddenly dawned on me how to identify where a catchphrase is from. The original form is "the giant rats of Sumatra," an obscure quote from Sherlock Holmes that inspired one if not more fan fictions. I realized that there's just one word difference between the two phrases.

So how does one figure out which word is changed? By performing five Google searches, each time omitting one of the words. For the above catchphrase, five Google searches;

"nerds of Sumatra"
the "nerds of Sumatra"
"the giant" "of Sumatra"
"the giant nerds" Sumatra
"the giant nerds of"

Be sure to use quotes to attempt to preserve the order of the words.

Google will then happily fill in the blanks. Looking at the Google Search results, it's something like 5, 5, 300k, 5, 5. It's immediately obvious which one is the original catchphrase.

Also, if it's an especially long catchphrase, I suppose one could use heuristics to decrease the number of required searches. For example, I don't suppose that eliminating the "the" from the catchphrase did a whole lot.

Additionally, if more than one word was substituted, you'd have to do even more Google searches.

I personally don't know if this has been published before or not, but it's just something really cool that I just figured out. Even if this is just a rudimentary brute force method for solving something, it gives answers where there used to be questions.