The Accidental Poetry of Google’s Predictive Search
By: Joe Berkowitz
A new Reddit thread showcases some of the inadvertently piquant poetry that happens, thanks to Google’s auto-finish.
Half the fun of finding what you’re looking for online is finding what you’re not looking for.
Most of the time, a happy search accident means falling into a binary code-borne wormhole of info unexpectedly. Every now and then, though, you only need get midway through the act of searching to get there. The predictive sentence-finishing capacity in Google’s browser shows you similar items other people have searched for, and now it turns out these items take on sobering new meaning when removed from context.
A new thread called Google Poems opened up on Reddit recently, showing off the accidental poetry of four different variations on a theme. There is just something so very Zen about the collision of different twists on the same subject, and the repetitive format evokes the staccato rhythms of poetry--particularly of the beat variety.
Have a look at some of our favorite offerings in the slide show above.
[Poet: Zurijeta via Shuttertstock]
