Revision as of 18:40, 8 June 2011

Overview

FilterBubblet is:

• a JavaScript bookmarklet that sends Google search results for a term to a web service
• a web service that stores the results in a database

The idea was born of the TED Talk "Filter Bubble" and Jeff's earlier experiment to test the filter bubble theory manually.

Rationale

• determine if the 'filter bubble' exists, and
• analyze the data and make useful observations, like showing people results they didn't see
• open the filter bubble experiment we conducted on the mailing list to a much larger userbase
  • potentially thousands of people could install the filterbubblet bookmarklet and send their results

Open Questions

• Is it possible to reliably extract Google search results from the result HTML?
  • Yes, or so it appears. The list of links is always in an ordered list with an element ID of "rso". Individual links appear to all be of class "tl". Drew 12:40, 8 June 2011 (MDT)

Random Ideas

• Geographic coordination
  • Web service could use GeoIP to guess user location, associate results with that location

Technical References

• jQuery Bookmarklet Generator
• How to Create a jQuery Bookmarklet
• Numbering Google Search Results with JavaScript bookmark - difficult to read, but bookmarklet does something close to what we want
• Same origin policy Workarounds - we'll need to use one of these techniques to send results to the database
• Using Sinatra with Bundler to Deploy on Heroku - possible web service/database starting point (Heroku is free, and Sinatra is comparitively easy)