One day, fiddling with Google, I noticed that you could search for plain integers -- 3, 42, 80386, whatever -- and get pagecounts that seemed to vary in interesting ways. Somebody should do something with this, I thought.
Just now, following a backlink, I stumbled across the Art and Architecture section of the rodcorp blog , and lo, Golan Levin and friends have taken that idea to the absolute limit. The Secret Life of Numbers is a breathtaking Java applet that visualizes results from "a popular search engine" along the dimension of integers up to 100000. Left-click-hold to zoom in, right-click-hold to zoom out. Wow!
Former URL: http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/2002/05/19.html#a252