Where's George?

Where's George? is a website that tracks American paper money — most commonly one-dollar bills, but also higher denominations. The name George refers to George Washington, whose portrait appears on the one dollar bill. Its popularity has led to the establishment of a number of other currency tracking websites, as well as sites that track other objects, such as used books.

The free site was established in 1998 by Hank Eskin, a computer consultant in Brookline, Massachusetts. It allows people to enter their local ZIP code and the serial and series of any United States denomination up to $100 they want to track. Once a bill is registered, the site reports the time between sightings, the distance traveled and any comments from the finders, and anyone who registered the bill earlier learns about it by e-mail and/or text messaging.

To increase the chance of having a bill reported, users (called "Georgers") write or stamp text on the bills encouraging bill finders to visit www.wheresgeorge.com and track the bill's travels.

Where's George? is supported by advertising, sales of T-shirts and other memorabilia, and by users who pay a fee for extra features.

Other currency tracking websites influenced by Where's George? include:

• Where's Willy?, for Canadian currency
• eurobilltracker, which launched shortly before the Eurobill was officially released.
• DoshTracker in England. In the UK its illegal to deface notes, so writing on notes is not an option, hence DoshTracker has not had the same kind of success as Where's George.
• osatsu.net in Japan

Where's George? was also the inspiration for the popular BookCrossing website.

Although Where's George? doesn't officially recognize the bills that travel the farthest or fastest, some have approached it as a semi-serious way to track patterns in the flow of American cash.

Where's George? and geocaching

The phenomenon of geocaching, in which small items are left in obscure places for others to find using GPS systems, has resulted in a problem. Some geocachers leave Where's George? bills, but this can make it too easy for friends or family members to find them, artificially inflating the number of hits for that bill and disrupting the intent of the site, which is to track money's natural path.

The Where's George? web site says it "prohibits trading or exchanging bills with friends, family or anyone known to the bill distributor. This rule is to encourage 'natural circulation' of the currency, and to prevent multiple 'fake hits' from happening on any bill." As a result, as of 2004, the site has dropped a separate listing of "Top 10 Geocache bills" and is cautioning that if geocache sites are used too often, "all Geocache bills will be removed from this site." Where's George bills may still be left in geocaches, but should not be logged if placed by someone the finder knows. [1] (http://www.wheresgeorge.com/wrapper.php?page=top10bills_dgc)

"George Score"

The "George Score" is a method of rating users based on how many bills they've entered and also by how many total hits they've had. The formula is as follows:

Because of the nature of square roots and natural logs, the higher a user's bills entered and hits are, the more of each are necessary to increase the score. A very good "George Score" is over 1000.

External links

• Where's George? web site (http://www.wheresgeorge.com/)
• Directory of Where's George related pages (http://www.wheresgeorge.net/) - a wealth of information regarding Where's George
• Cash Trail (http://forbes.com/business/forbes/2005/0328/064.html) - an article in Forbes magazine about Where's George.