Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon comes to Google

Google has built popular party game Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon into its search engine.

Created by a trio of students at Pennsylvania's Albright college in 1994, the game is based on the idea that it is possible to connect every movie star in the world to the X-Men: First Class actor in no more than six moves.

The concept went on to spawn a website, board game and book, and was eventually embraced by Bacon himself, who launched SixDegrees.org as a charity initiative.

Users can take advantage of Google's built-in Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon by typing 'Bacon number' followed by the name of the actor into the search box to establish how the two are connected.

For instance, entering 'Bacon number Daniel Craig' will reveal that there are two degrees of separation between the pair. Craig appeared alongside Embeth Davidtz in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, and Bacon and Davidtz shared the screen in Murder in the First.

"If you think about search in the traditional sense, for years it has been to try and match, find pages and sources where you would find the text," Google lead engineer Yossi Matias told The Hollywood Reporter.

"It's interesting that this small-world phenomena when applied to the world of actors actually shows that in most cases, most actors aren't that far apart from each other. And most of them have a relatively small Bacon number."

Bacon himself is yet to comment on Google's new search function.