I'm Feeling Lucky

In the course of my reading and writing, I do a tremendous amount of online research, and I can never anticipate where my studies will lead me. My intellectual journeys generally start with a question, subject or name entered into Google.

Before I can even finish typing in my search, Google's algorithms generate a list of suggestions that appear on my screen and change with each letter I add. Sometimes what I'm looking for appears right away, sometimes it doesn't appear at all until I'm finished typing and hit Enter, and sometimes the suggestions take me in a whole different direction.

There is a website called Google Poetics (www.googlepoetics.com) - not affiliated in any way with Google, Inc. - that publishes the drop down results of partial searches typed into the Google search bar.

The results range from the truly hilarious to the deeply profound. Here is just one example:

This can even be taken a step farther to create a longform poem by using the last prompt to suggest the beginning of a new search such as in the following:

Another interesting note is that if the same person enters the same query at different times, the results change, and if different people enter the exact same query, the results will be widely diverse.

It would be interesting to coordinate a project with my Facebook friends, to see what would happen if we all entered the same phrase and then posted the results.