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Finding Friends Via Search Query Analysis
prostoalex writes "How many times have you met an interesting person, who happened to check out the same book in the library, or listen to the same music as you do? Researchers from University of Chicago suggest that it would be kinda cool if you could find like-minded people by analyzing the queries submitted to a Web search engine. Their PDF paper explains the research in more detail."
Forget about search queries, what about referers? I've met a lot of interesting people by looking at the referrer logs for my blog/website, and following them back to their blogs. I've even met some of them in person after talking to them online.
Talk about coincidence... I met someone <wink wink> less than 50 miles from me, who linked to an obscure page on my web site.
This will result in every porno watching person from perverts to pedophiles to unite into one large and dangerous organization.
Also privacy, spam, etc. Don't want one guy who looked for porn one time to get sucked into 10 porn mailing lists or anything like that.
The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
Not the best way to find a new best friend I think, but if you wanted to commit a crime that needed accomplices it would be a lot easier to find like-minded individuals whose real names you wouldn't know.
Like this, you mean? www.coincidencedesign.com
I don't know if it's for real, but if it is, it disturbs me.
Get your own free personal location tracker
There used to be a "search voyeur" CGI that would show you the searches that were recently performed on some search engine or another. It was fun to watch, but was sometimes frustrating. You'd see someone search for "Japanese women" and you would want to edit their search and do "Japanese women +naked" because you knew that's what they really wanted, but were too newb to do it right.
Then, there would be the guy who would search for "Windows sucks Linux roolz" and you'd wish you could start chatting with him.
But finally I made my own website, and now I can search the referrer logs (hint: grep for "?query=" b/c it seems a pretty common referrer string) for funny searches. My favourite was someone searching for pictures of naked women fishing. Is there some popular naked women fishing fetish out there or something? I'd never heard of it. But the searches kept bringing up my pages, and people kept clicking through.
fifth sigma, inc.
Not even an opposite sex version of yourself?
Um... wait.. that's even more gross. Or is it?
You decide.
I'm too sexy for you.
This idea is rather like something that's already available on LiveJournal. Users have the option to list anywhere up to 100 interests. You can then search for people who have a specific interest listed (it brings up both people and communities), but even better is if you're a paid member - you can search for people who share the highest number of common interests. The only down-side is that sometimes when you find a really cool person, their journal will have been inactive for a year or two.
Karma: Ran over your dogma.
Is there scope in the market for a non sex based matchmaking service, a 'FindPeer' service to encourage one on one peer (or coach or mentor) based short relationships? I did a rough spec and
wiki page on such a service but at 10 hits from google in 4 months maybe it is not worth more investigation without more marketing!
Most newsgroups and slashdot items seldom lead to interesting one on one discussion except perhaps for aggressive self opinionated 'experts' (allegedly).
FYI I may have time for some one on one discussion but not necessarily to join an open source programming project, and the local linux group does not seem approachable enough for this purpose. Also the peer development may not necessarily be in the computing field.
Signed a meek want-to-be peer developed with 10 years developer experience.
Be Free: Free Software Tuition
Amen brother!
I work in a pretty small IT shop and I'm the only one that does what I do, the rest have other specialties. When I'm in situations where I'm immersed in other IT people like myself I always remark on how much I *dislike* those people, even though we share a lot of the same interests.
I find the same thing to be true in a lot of areas -- a lot of the people that I find that like X I don't like, even though we both like X.
The people I do like and spend time with have more subtle and abstract similarities from a personality perspective, and in ordinary ways are quite different from me, which is usually a good thing.
I find what interests me in people is uniqueness of perspective and depth of feeling. People with John Q. Public opinions and no feeling about them don't turn me on. People that feel passionately about something unusual I find fascinating, even if I find their opinions unappealing.
I'm familiar with someone who embraces a lot of pretty scary far-right attitudes on politics, race, and so on, but he's capable of explaining them in an intelligent and thoughtful way. At the end of the day I disagree with him, but I still think he's very interesting.