FilterBubblet
From Splatspace
Contents |
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?
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)
