
Exploring the Vastness of a Website - cookingoils
https://elliott.computer/exploring-the-vastness-of-a-website/
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AlexDragusin
Love the "surprise me" on [https://wiby.me/](https://wiby.me/)

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benbristow
I made a wee microsite that I've never really shared with anyone. I'm half
expecting it to go down if I post it here.

[https://domaingame.benbristow.co.uk/](https://domaingame.benbristow.co.uk/)

Basically takes a random word from a dictionary of English words and adds a
random extension to the end, checks if the site up and returns the domain else
loops until it does.

Found some weird & wonderful stuff through it!

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cookingoils
This is very cool. Thanks for sharing. Reminds me a little of this site:
[http://vacantstartup.brycewilner.com/](http://vacantstartup.brycewilner.com/)

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nicolia
This article reminds me of the one truly explorative news aggregate app I used
some years ago called Zite. Zite would not only pull news from the usual major
sources, but it would also pull up obscure blogs and micro niche indie
publications on the topic. It was my first time discovering blogs in their
original form (not as posts on tumblr). Zite let my discover so much aggregate
information from sources that only someone with a pre-existing niche interest
would know about. A mudslide in a small Italian village where no one was
harmed, but a boulder rolled itself into a villa's sitting room. A tiny
Lutheran blog explaining the latin origins of St. Patrick with cited
footnotes. A modern explorer's article on the greatest used bookstores they
have found around the world (it was not a listicle). The intellectual stimulus
was greatly missed once Zite was purchased by Flipboard and all of those
nuggets from the vastness of the internet were overruled by the loudest and
largest news publications.

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kingkool68
I wish Amazon had a random button. Several years ago my friend wanted to
randomly browse Amazon for things and I thought it would be easy to randomly
generate URLs for products but I kept getting 404s. Figured I would need to
use the API to scoop up product IDs and randomly go through those to randomly
browse Amazon.

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Jaruzel
Alternatively, you could just have a dictionary file and randomly pick a word
to search Amazon with:

[https://www.amazon.co.uk/s?k={RANDOM_WORD}](https://www.amazon.co.uk/s?k={RANDOM_WORD})

Seems much simpler.

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AlexDragusin
The issue with this is that one would end up with a page of stuff related to
the keyword as opposed to the desirable way of ending up with an actual
product page itself.

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FillardMillmore
It seems that most people today prefer to have their content curated and
streamlined - with less need to "explore". With the Muxtape example - that's
actually an interesting implementation of a random content selector. But how
many other viable implementations could you think of? Perhaps I'm just not
that creative, but I can't think of many.

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cookingoils
It's true, I don't know if I'd necessarily recommend a random content selector
for Airbnb as an example. That said it could actually be interesting to see a
selection of random places to visit around the world. Reminds me a bit of
closing your eyes, opening an Atlas to a random page, and putting a finger
down on a place. I understand your point though that there are times when
random doesn't cut it or becomes vague. I also wonder if there are other
simple ways we could improve explore pages beyond the go-to recommendations
engine or random selector.

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FillardMillmore
I guess that depends upon what our definition of "simple" is. If we have
content that we are presenting to the user, in my eyes, it can be curated
somehow (like a recommender system) or it could be uncurated (random selection
would fall in this category).

For companies that are trying to sell a product or are trying to present users
with content relevant to them, that would seem to call for some kind of
content curation.

I think we would be surprised if we knew how many online retailers still do
recommendations based solely on your buying history (and also, perhaps, the
buying history of others who have bought items similar to you). I think to
improve these recommendation engines, we should improve the underlying
algorithms.

To improve said algorithms, I think graph databases like Neo4j have an
important role to play as they are built for this sort of thing. To present
better and more relevant content, we'd need two primary things - more
information about the user in question (and I'm all for transparency in both
collecting this data and informing the user how it will be utilized) and
better algorithms to leverage that information. With the response times of a
queried result set originating from multiple levels of depth-traversal in a
graph database compared to the response time of a similar query in a
traditional RDBMS, I'd say that graph databases are an important and vital
component to making this kind of thing better for everyone.

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iod
I have enjoyed the random feature of Reddit
[https://www.reddit.com/r/random](https://www.reddit.com/r/random) which I
have a favorite link to in my browser. I think it follows what the author is
trying to get at.

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TrevorFSmith
Indeed, the random article link on Wikipedia is a delight.

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cookingoils
I would completely agree. It is one of my favorite features. I decided to
leave Wikipedia out of this post, but I think they've done an amazing job
creating tools to explore the vastness of the site.

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aehtyb
nice post

making a page that offers tools to find random content on specific sites seems
like a fun idea, maybe as a starting point for an even larger project

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cookingoils
Thanks! Yes it does. Let me know if you have any ideas : )

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fernly
Graphically it should suggest the experience of wandering the stacks of a
large library. Have you been in the stacks of a big University or city
library? Narrow, ill-lit aisles, books shelved on both sides, from the floor
to well above your head. Oooh! Oooh! you could model it after Terry
Pratchett's Unseen University Library[1].

[1]
[https://wiki.lspace.org/mediawiki/Library](https://wiki.lspace.org/mediawiki/Library)

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saagarjha
Another place where randomization is useful is webcomics. I’ve gone through
most of xkcd by just hitting the “Random” button, even tough I would never
have the patience to sit through the comics one by one and keep track of how
far I’d gotten.

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gwern
Would using ArchiveBinge
([https://archivebinge.com/](https://archivebinge.com/)), which feeds you _n_
comics per day using RSS, work for that use-case?

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saagarjha
It’s sad, but I don’t actually have RSS software on my computer anymore. In
any case I would flip through xkcd to waste time, not so I could stay up-to-
date (I have a Slack bot that posts new comics regularly, funnily enough).

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gwern
There are RSS to email tools!

