Way back before Google became the pinnacle of search engines on the net, and slightly after WebCrawler became archaic, I stumbled upon Metacrawler. It was a search engine for search engines. It’d query the other existing engines and give you a list of the most likely candidates for your search. This, in the mid-90s, was quite the neat tool. It had promise, and it was quite a bit less time consuming than fumbling about on Lycos, WebCrawler, AltaVista, &c manually.

Not long afterwards, MetaCrawler promoted their own MetaSpy, a page that let you see (nearly realtime, supposively), what people were using MetaCrawler to search for.

Being amazingly bored at the time, I found this to be quite the humorous thing – how people could search for strange things, and even create groups unintentionally across multiple users. (A recent search set was for ”(sex AND drags AND rocken AND roll)”, with the one listed below as “clarinet quintet mozart notes”. Certainly different, yet similar mindsets.)

Now that the background has been laid out, I hope you have a better idea of what I’m getting at. Spying on searches on search engines can be a fun way to pass the time… or, if not, well, at least it can get a giggle every so often. If nothing else, it’s a welcome diversion after staring at the same piece of code for hours.

I’ve setup two rather poor zsh macros. Poor as the logic is horrible, and, well, they rely on a half dozen common utilities to get the job done. I could do it better, but I just needed a quick hack. Feel free to fix them up, or even make them more portable. ;)

Here they are, two macros to display items searched for on MetaCrawler, and Kanoodle:

mspy () { echo ”—MetaCrawler Searches—”; lynx -dump -nolist http://www.metaspy.com/spymagic/Spy\?filter=false | tail -21 | head -10 | sed -e ’s/\[.\]//’ e ’s/^\ \ \ /\ \ /’; echo “- EOF -” } kspy () { echo “- Kanoodle Searches—”; lynx -dump -nolist http://www.kanoodle.com/spy/spy.cool | tail -29 | head -20 | sed e ‘n;d’ | sed ’s/^.\ /*\ /’; echo “- EOF—” }

They’re quite simple, really, and will look something like this (Note that these are accurate, legit searches. I just cuttenpasted, so don’t hold me liable for something odd here! ;) ):

3:03 [wackmac] /Users/shawn%mspy—MetaCrawler Searches—* saatiprint shanghai

• neil’s grage’
• am i hot
• shangai download
• food
• History of Diamond Industry in Antwerp
• gender change fiction
• V4.51 Award
• richmond indiana
• mlabs.csd.auth.gr—EOF—3:03 [wackmac] /Users/shawn%kspy—Kanoodle Searches—* mp3
• environmental consulting
• carol hall first national
• chat
• gang violence
• Cancun
• casino games
• paris carrefour
• environmental consulting
• sokolac—EOF— Happy spying!