For the past few months I’ve been working on a curatorial project with the Internet Archive, to be released on their Tumblr account early next year. One of the experiments for this project searches the Internet Archive for a given term, downloads the first result, parses the most frequent word and uses that as a seed for the next search. For example:
seed > plants > leaves > chinese > heaven > minerva > questo
An interesting result: this process goes from general to more and more specific until no search results are found. This is actually an interesting opposite of my Wikipedia Loops project, where a similar algorithmic path goes from specific to general, eventually falling into a meta-loop.
The code for this experiment is available here: https://gist.github.com/jeffThompson/6718129