January 31, 2022

Search Engine as Dice

When you enter a query in google search, you can almost always see different results coming out. As a user, I never know what affects these search results because the algorithms beneath these search results are skillfully hidden in clean and organized UX.

A screenshot of the search results of "Jan 6" in google.com, seen from chrome logged in with my gmail account
A screenshot of the search results of “Jan 6” in google.com, seen from chrome logged in with my gmail account
A screenshot of the search results of "Jan 6" in google.com, seen from chrome's incognito mode
A screenshot of the search results of “Jan 6” in google.com, seen from chrome’s incognito mode

I wondered if I could utilize these mysterious differences in search engine results for a narrative generation system, as if using a dice. In other words, it would be a diary-like narrative generation system based on different search engine results of a certain date. The rules are as below:

  1. Enter today’s date(for example, Jan 31) in a search engine of your choice. It can be any website that has a search feature & enough results. You can choose anything – for example – Google News, Twitter’s latest tab, DuckDuckGo, etc.
  2. Write down the first sentence of each result. Repeat 3 times. This will be the diary of that day.
  3. Repeat this for tomorrow’s date.

A screenshot of the story geneartion template that automatically collects search results with today's date as queries
A screenshot of the story geneartion template that automatically collects search results with today’s date as queries

Based on these rules, I made a quick prototype of this system using google spreadsheet to automatically scrap search results from the web, according to today’s date.

See the results below to see if the story makes any sense!


Jeeyoon Hyun designs and develops weird websites and virtual experiences. Based in Brooklyn & Seoul, she is currently pursuing her master's degree at NYU ITP.

If you're looking for more detailed stuff, check out the old blog links here!