How scoring works

An example stack

This is the fast food stack from puzzle #1. It covers US Google searches for the week of 25-31 October 2026. Here’s how it looks when you start:

Your job is to put it in order, most searched at the top. Say you lock in this guess:

And here’s the answer:

The order comes from each term’s Google Trends score for the week. The search counts are estimates. How we count explains both.

You score pairs

Five terms make 10 pairs. For each pair, your guess puts one term above the other. You get a point when that term really was searched more. That’s 10 points per stack and 30 per day.

Here are all 10 pairs from the guess above:

7 pairs right out of 10, so this guess scores 7/10.

What cost points

• Taco Bell cost 2 points. It was really 2nd, but the guess put it 4th, below Chick-fil-A and Burger King.
• Chick-fil-A cost 1 point by sitting above McDonald’s.

A term placed far from its real spot loses a point for every term it jumped over. A term one place off loses at most one.

Why pairs, not exact positions

Only Wendy’s is in exactly the right slot, so counting exact slots would score this guess 1 out of 5. Yet most of the order is right: McDonald’s above Burger King, Chick-fil-A above Wendy’s, and so on. Counting pairs gives credit for every part of the order you got right, and a near miss costs less than a wild guess.

The squares

Your share card shows one square per term, in the order you ranked them. Each square shows how far that term was from its real position:

• 🟩 right spot
• 🟨 one place off
• ⬛ two or more places off

The squares don’t affect your score. For the guess above:

On the share card, this stack’s row reads ⬛🟨🟨⬛🟩 Fast food. A perfect stack is five green squares.