The Search Engine Belt Buckle

ptorrone writes "Engadget shows how they made "The Search Engine Belt Buckle" a PDA-based device which shows 24 hours of all the bizarre and banal things people are looking for on the web. Art project or pointless hack? That's for you to decide, people are searching for some pretty freaky stuff out there, so why not put in a belt buckle and get on the scene like a sex machine?"

Video clips?!?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why the hell are they using video clips to display this information? Why not, you know, a text file of the search terms? This seemed cool and all, but when I saw that they were using Windows Media Player to do screen capture on a website, they instantly lost 50 square geek points. Square points!

A much more entertaining game to play is

[Artifex]

A much more entertaining game to play is, which product(s) is Engadget actually shilling in its latest article?

We all know that this is a commercial blog, so for this last article, was it Windows Media 9, Dogpile's SearchSpy, the PocketPC division of Microsoft, or some combination of them all?

Re:I see the attraction

[M. Silver]

And who wouldn't want to listen in on a confessional booth every now and then? Sure you'll never know who made what search, but it's a peek inside someone's psyche that you would never get the chance to see otherwise. Mental voyeurism.

You get some of that, on a sufficiently eclectic site, just grepping through the referers [sic] in the web log (no, not that kind of web log, the real kind).

Google's not the best one for that, though. Ask.com (Ask Jeeves) is better, because people apparently think the thing is Eliza and have conversations with it.

I did get one goodie from Google: "So maybe it's not exactly 'inspiration' per se, probably more like boredom, but i'm back! yippie!" I'm not sure if they got the Google and IM windows mixed up or what.

I at one point started documenting them, with commentaries, but I haven't updated it in awhile:

http://www.phoenyx.net/cgi-bin/twiki/bin/view/Ma in /SillySearches

What do you do if you think someone is trying to kill you?
WHAT ARE THE CORRECT CUTTING TORCH SETTINGS
hey man expensive looking boots
how do i cook snake
"upgrade to Word for OS X"

The scary thing is that all those searches found my site.

No belt-buckle searches have appeared yet, to the best of my knowledge.

Re:chic magnet

[scrod]

I don't know, seems like a rather effective way to get people to bend down and observe your crotch area with great interest.

Did anyone notice...

[XeRXeS-TCN]

That when you look at the Searchspy list, someone has recently searched for "die slashdotters" :p

Slightly pointless all in all, there's no real skill involved in using WMP on a PDA which you've essentially duct taped to yourself. Since most people won't actually see what it says (unless you're comfortable with the idea of a large group of men and women squatting in a nightclub, huddled around your crotch... but maybe that's your thing) it would be more fun to actually play a proper movie, like a disco scene or some psychadelic winamp-style visualisation, so you could actually appreciate the belt beyond about 6 inches away...

OT: "chic" vs "chick"

[Iffy Bonzoolie]

Ok, I am a software engineer, and thusly a pedantic fuck, so I have to posit: When I see chic [reference.com] I think its pronounced "sheek" and means trendy or popular. When I talk about an attractive young adult female human, I think chick [reference.com], like a baby chicken. Am I wrong? Dictionaries seem to support me.

Though, I have to admit that chicks are often chic.

-If

Re:Maybe we can have an award

[Dusabre]

I find it disturbing that there are people who willingly piss themselves because they gorge themselves on soft drinks (or beer) and absolutely cannot miss a couple of seconds of the game. Can't you hold it in until the break?

I thought I was pretty jaded...