FilterBubblet

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Revision as of 19:57, 8 June 2011 by Drew (Talk | contribs)

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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?
    • 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)
    • Even easier than that. The <a> is always of class "l" so the following code will dump, in order, the list of google search results (assumes use of Firebug plugin for Firefox).
javascript:
var p=document.getElementsByTagName('*');
function gc()
{
	for(i=0;i<p.length;i++){
		if(p[i].className=='l'){
			console.log(p[i].href);
		}
	};
};
gc();

Random Ideas

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

Technical References