I know there is a trend amongst some to decry google, but they consistenly produce little nuggets of software delight. I went back to their labs, trying to find the google homepage api to see if I could satisfy my epiphling; The epiphling awoke to me clicking on the first result from google, and thinking “why doesn’t it know that I feel lucky?” To which it answered,

〖well, you already have all your search history, so why not just use a greasemonkey script to auto-forward to the site I would have clicked on? Further, if we can’t determine with certainty which site we should go to, leave the page open but open in tabs the five sites we were most likely to click on. Subsequently watch to see how the opened tabs are treated (Are they closed without scrolling? Scrolled all the way? Have multiple pages opened from it?) and use those values to refine the tab-opening weighting.〗

Having found the API I also came across this spiffy “site flavored” search tool. Basically you give it your website, and it tries to auto-classify it. It could not classify mine (which, I must confess, made me preen a bit; though in all honesty it should shame me) and so I provided it with all sorts of details about the categories of my site - to their credit they let you pick many leaves from their categorical tree. What follows is the result, which I will integrate into this site as soon as I take the time to de-fugly the code:

Google

So then I thought I’d try to use google sets as a sort of oracle, and gave it five terms that seem related in my head; its expansion of the set was quite pleasant. Almost makes me want a google set API :)