Joi Ito's conversation with the living web.

The Search Engine Belt Buckle »

Joichi Ito
Aug 26, 2004 - 06:50 UTC »

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I remember when I was Chairman of Infoseek Japan, I would get a weekly list of the top 100 search words. I remember loving this list. You could see watch trends and stuff, but mostly it made you realize just how sick people were. When I was around, the only US search term that beat adult content phrases was "Olympics" and the only Japanese query was "Tamagocchi" when it was all the rage.

Now uber-gadget-hacker Phillip Torrone has brought this experience to the street via the Search Engline Belt Buckle. It uses the SearchSpy service which shows real search queries and is provided by Dogpile, the metasearch engine.

I suppose this is slightly more useful than an RSS feed of my weight, but definitely harder to build.

 
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1 Comment

01. Mike B. - Aug 27, 2004 - 04:59 Reply

What a creative and cool device! The problem is that it would give everyone in your city the perfect excuse to stare at your crotch. Or, is that the hidden genius behind this device?

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Search Engine Belt Buckle from John Battelle's Searchblog
August 26, 2004 11:59 AM

Joi finds someone who has created a belt buckle that displays streaming search queries. Now that's...odd.... Read More

Belt buckle turned search/sex machine from we make money not art
August 26, 2004 2:50 PM

Phillip Torrone explains step by step in Engadget how to build your own Search Engine Belt Buckle, a PDA displaying 24 hours of all the bizarre and banal things people are looking for on the web. If there Read More

The Search Engine Belt Buckle from Konomi Blog
August 28, 2004 7:19 PM

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