Google’s New “Bacon Number” Search Answers Those “Degree Of Kevin Bacon” Questions

Six Degrees Of Bacon is a popular game where people try to guess how actors are connected to Kevin Bacon through movies they’ve been in. Now Google is making it easy with a new “bacon number” search.

Measuring Bacon Numbers

To get the “bacon number” of any actor, simply start your search with “bacon number” followed by the actors name. For example, “bacon number scarlett johansson” gives you this:

The result shows that Johansson has a “bacon number” of two, which means you can get to a movie she’s been in with an actor connected with Kevin Bacon in only two jumps.

The result also explains those jumps, listing the movies and actors in the chain. It goes from Johansson being with Bill Murray in Lost In Translation to Murray being in Wild Things with Bacon. Yeah, that’s right. Murray was in Wild Things.

Bacon & Woody?

Surely there must be a big jump between Kevin Bacon and Woody Allen. Nope, only two again:

Bacon & Buzz Aldrin?

How about Kevin Bacon and the second man to walk on the moon, Buzz Aldrin. Crazy? Nope. Aldrin’s been in several movies, giving him a bacon number of only two:

Bacon Matrimony

As in real life, in movie life, Bacon’s wife Kyra Sedgwick is only one degree away from her husband:

Nothing Goes Better With Bacon Than Bacon

My favorite is what happens when you ask about Bacon himself:

“Kevin Bacon’s Bacon number is 0.” As it should be. Enjoy more Bacon by following him on Twitter or Facebook, where the picture above comes from. No, he’s not on Google+, it seems. Maybe this will entice him.

The Background On Bacon

How did the game get started? Wikipedia has a rundown on it all emerging from a 1994 magazine interview he did, where he commented about having worked with everyone in Hollywood or someone’s who’s worked with someone else.

That seemed to inspire three college students to invent the game, in turn leading to appearances on The Jon Stewart Show and The Howard Stern Show, helping bring it further into popular culture.

Bacon has done a commercial that parodied the game and joked about it in TV roles. Bacon even launched a non-profit called Six Degrees that helps raise money for charities.

Google “Easter Eggs”

FYI, Google didn’t formally announce this new service. Rather, it just quietly added it. We spotted it off a tweet from the head of Google’s spam fighting team, Matt Cutts.

It’s just one of several “Easter Eggs” that Google has rolled out over the years. See others ones in the related entries, below.