Pi Search Engine

How does this work?

π (pi) is a number whose digits run on forever without ever repeating — 3.14159265… and on, and on. Because they never settle into a pattern, just about any string of digits you can imagine turns up somewhere inside it. Including your name.

But to search, your name first has to become a number. The obvious way would be a = 1, b = 2 … z = 26. The catch: letters from j onward are two digits, so an eight-letter name can balloon to twelve or more digits — and a number that long hides so deep in π that you'd need an impossibly large slice of it to ever reach the spot.

So instead your whole name is folded into one number and kept short enough to actually find. The trade-off is collisions: because the number is short, a few different names can point at the same spot in π. That isn't a bug, and it isn't about how many digits we store — it's simply what happens when you squeeze 26 letters into so few digits. Think of it as sharing a lucky spot.

This search looks through the first billion digits of π. Short names show up almost instantly; the longest ones live deeper and occasionally fall just outside even a billion digits.