Any clever ideas on how to find some random records?

[Brian Dunning <brian@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I have a MySQL database with about a million records. I'd like to use  
the SQL command "order by RAND()" but my ISP won't let me: whenever  
the server gets spidered, Google overloads their MySQL server because  
of all the overhead of that command. I can't just cloak the spiders  
because I need them to find the random pages.

So...what I've been doing for small sets of records is to use PHP to  
generate a bunch of random record ID's, then I construct a long SQL  
statement to find all the matching records. This works, but if I want  
to generate a big index page to list a hundred or a thousand records,  
it could get pretty clunky.

Anyone have any better suggestions?   :)

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