I built my own surfboard, peoples
Glad to not be sitting through a SIX AND A HALF HOURS Windows update – as I did with my work laptop yesterday... I mean, you've got to be kidding me....
> What benefits do you see writing giving your life?
Playing with word arrangements until maximizing satisfaction with meaning and flow is simply an enjoyable activity in and of itself.
<waves somewhat sadly>
Somewhat tired of leaning on obviously financially biased search engines, I hit upon a kind of fun way to visit sites I normally wouldn't, in the former of a Lua script that does this:
1) Read a text file 2) Parse down “word-like” strings to an array of words (no whitespace or punctuation, don't begin with a number, are at least two characters in length) 3) Force the words to lowercase (not really necessarily, come to think of it) 4) One at a time – based on an array index derived randomly from /dev/random – point the elinks or lynx terminal browser at “.com” appended to the “current” word randomly found (I try elinks first because it's weaker in the SSL certificates department, and then lynx if that fails for said reason)
It's been rather fun. I mean, on the somewhat disappointing side, you quickly discover how many domains are “parked”, as well as how many rely – in my opinion – too heavy on Javascript to display anything if/when Javascript can't run (my opinion is excessive Javascript reliance constitutes “happy horse shit” relative to sites more about actual content than programmatic shenanigans).
But there've been many fun hits.
Obviously, improvements are possible, including – but certainly not limited to – deriving more domain “words” from text content found at sites themselves, attempting multi-word domains, perhaps trying all the major domain suffixes (although I get the feeling that list is now a lot longer than it was “back in the day”...)
Is it going to find everything? Of course not. Is it “indexing” what it finds? No. But such isn't the point. The point is to semi-randomly arrive at places I normally wouldn't for having to rely on others' idea of a “good search time”.