firmament.to
Francis Hwang

firmament.to is intended as an exploration of the promise of hypertext. It parses any publically available HTML page and turns every word it can into a link — click on a word and you are taken to a relevant page, as determined by Google. When every word is turned into a link, is that empowering or numbing? When context is stripped so callously from links, does that lay the seeds for chaos, or inspiration?

firmament.to uses a few server-side Perl scripts to do its parsing. When it was first programmed in July 2000, it used a virtual browser to spider search results from Google. In the winter of 2001, that was discovered and the IP address was blocked, since auto-indexing Google in this way is explicitly against their Terms of Service. The subsequent release of Google's Web API made this software possible again.


project homepage: http://firmament.to
keywords: remix-perl-html-deconstructive-Google software for the Internet
category: browser art
uploaded by sera, 16 Feb 2003




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