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Digital Art

where is…?

Jill6 Comments

I have so many things I want to blog and can’t find the time to do it. Most disheartening.

Meanwhile, here is one of those charming little poems Google sometimes generates for you when you start typing a search phrase into the browser window.

Now I just have to remember what I was REALLY searching for. Nothing on this list – I think!?

Oh, and just for the sake of research: how personalised is this? I don’t recognise any of it, but maybe it’s somehow connected to  my Google + friends and my gmail or something?

Update at 3:44 pm: Solveig tried it in Norwegian, and got

“Hvor er det varmt i februar
Hvor er det varmt i desember
Hvor er det varmt i januar
Hvor er Willy”

Very well suited to Norwegian conditions! So of course I had to try, and was surprised to see that my results were a little different.

Where are you? 
Where is my wife lyrics
Where is it warm in February
Where is it warm in January
Where is blåfjell [note: Blåfjell is a fictional mountain in a kids TV series]
Where is there snow
Where is Willy
Where is it warm in November
Where are my trousers [this quotes a kids song]
Where is my appendix 

This clearly has not only great potential as an art project, but could actually yield a rather fascinating scholarly paper about cultural differences. You could run this search for dozens of languages, maybe all languages (why not) and run them all through Google Translate (of course) and compare and contrast. What fun.

I wish the second query in the Norwegian poem didn’t include the lyrics. “Where is my wife” is a much more interesting question to be asking Google.

And in fact, it seems my Facebook friends are doing the cross-cultural analysis in the comments to my post there 😉

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6 thoughts on “where is…?”

  1. Eva @Mostraum Viewpoint

    I get the same, but not in the same order. Funny that.

  2. Liz Lawley

    Not personlized, I think, because I got the same top three.

  3. Liss

    I think the lyrics must be from hte children’s rhyme ” hvem er det som banker”. How weird!

  4. Liss

    Totally strike that. And never comment on blogs after 0315 breast feeds.. But very interesting post!

  5. Franziska

    I just tried the same in German and the top 4 results, the only ones shown, made me laugh:
    1. Where is it forbidden to stop the car (meaning, stopping the car for 3 minutes to jump out and buy something, instead of parking there for longer)
    2. Where is it forbidden to park the car?
    3. Where is my water?
    4. Where is Fred? (this being the name of a German movie)

  6. Anne Helmond

    Autocompleteme is one of my favorite blogs: http://failblog.org/tag/autocomplete-me/ 🙂

    A related paper that might be of interest is Personal Web searching in the age of semantic capitalism: Diagnosing the mechanisms of personalisation
    by Martin Feuz, Matthew Fuller, and Felix Stalder.
    First Monday, Volume 16, Number 2 – 7 February 2011
    http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/viewArticle/3344/2766

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