nulutative was one of the mystery words I posted here which still gets zero(0) ghits -- not even that one!

(evidently these archives aren't visible to Google)

-joe (google me this) friday

Interesting word, coined by an interesting author. I would assume that nulutative would derive from nulutatus a past passive participle of a putative verb nuluto (-are) of unknown origin or meaning. I don't think nullus comes into play, save that it was some kind of mistake on Brin's part, because there is but a single l in the word under discussion. Hmm, my first WAG was that it was some negative (i.e., with n(e)-) version of ululate (from Latin ululo 'to howl').

here's the context again: Among other important factors are [...] mental technique (e.g. associative, extrapolative, intuitive, holographic, or nulutative)..

David Brin writes:

In this case the word does NOT come from "Mrs. Byrne's Dictionary of Unusual Words." Rather, it is made-up for a very good storytelling reason. Sometimes, the reader is supposed to FEEL that there have been new concepts developed in the future. Inserting a neologism is better than saying "they didn't know about this in 2007."

I didn't mention Mrs. B in my query, but I did provide a link to this forum, so David must have actually looked in here.

-joe (fact-finding) friday

Talk about your egregious hyphenization.

is that a request?

hey! what's wrong with fact-finding??

-joe (nothing made-up in my hyphenation) friday

*snortle*

I'll never understand the workings of Google® -- now that this thread is thoroughly entrenched with several ghits, the original post from the archives (dated 06/21/01) also shows up.

honest injun, it wasn't there as of 08/28/07.

-joe (whamboozled) friday

Google works by having spiders creep through the pages, following all links. Since there's a link here to the original page, it's brought into the circle. Google spiders (and those of many other search engines) hit the pages that are most active, and follow links from there.

what, then, is the statute of limitations, as it were.

-joe (bygones) friday

Mice, thousands of viruses, Y2K bugs and now spiders. Honestly, computer people have creepy minds!

That I don't know, sorry. I'd imagine that it's more a threshold--pages that have less than X hits, for example. I could try watching the bots crawl over my forum and see if I detect a pattern, but frankly, I lack the time.