We all know the web can be a watcher's paradise. Type "voyeur" into any search engine and you get up to 800,000 sites. But you'd better pay more than usual attention to how blue your links are.
What's less well known is that there are plenty of more intriguing ways to peer into the internet. If the web is a nation of voyeurs, who's watching the watchmen? Well, you can. Many search engines now offer "Search Voyeurs", services which display a random sample of searches taking place at that moment.
Magellan http://voyeur.mckinley.com/cgi-bin/voyeur.cgi is typical, giving you a random selection of 10 searches updated every few seconds. As with all the Search Voyeurs, if any of the searches catch your eye, you can click on them to see the results for yourself. Most automatically filter out the more offensive search items (MetaCrawler's Search Voyeur at www.metaspy.com offers you a choice: 'MetaSpy' or 'MetaSpy Exposed'). But sometimes what is not said makes you nervous. At www.askjeeves.com/docs/peek you can Ask Jeeves to "peek through the keyhole": most people's questions are worryingly trivial or bizarre. In my case, what the butler saw included: "Where do pencils come from?" and "Where can I find resources from Britannica.com on dynamite?"
It's not all depressing though: another 20 seconds produced "Where can I find resources on otolaryngology?" and "Where can I learn about Pythagoras of Samos?" Voyeurism isn't always about identification with the observed. Robert Burns wrote: "O wad some Pow'r the giftie gie us / To see oursels as others see us!" We still can't do that; but we can see others and be glad we're not them.
One curious voyeur ran a capture program on the MetaSpy Search Voyeur and placed the results on the web (see www.firstpr.com.au/curiosity): even a quick look here will have you glad you're not the person who searched for "Hello Metaspy, I know you want to see me!" Apart from curiosity, watching people can also be an excellent way to learn something new. www.cyveillance.com that specialises in watching users online has estimated the number of web pages at 3 billion, with 7 million new pages every day. Research by another corporate voyeur suggests the average home surfer will use about six of those pages daily.
So how do you find out what else is out there? Watch someone else using topic-specific search voyeurs - http://stockcharts.com/SharpCharts/voyeur.html for stock-market charts, http://food.epicurious.com/food_kwd/content.htm for new recipes ("Pizza + marinade" anyone?) - but for a truly expansive experience, you need a Webring.
Webrings, strings of sites with connected themes which link themselves into a chain, often give the opportunity to jump to a random site on the ring. www.webring.org/cgi-bin webring?ring=milprod;random will give you a random site on the Military Products Webring. (I got Firebase Higgy's Supply Sergeant, for "Custom-made Veterans [sic] patches and other memorabilia"; and "Scars of Honour", "a novel of the Russian Front by retired professional soldier Faron Norris.)
The Diary Webring brought me Moonlight Memoirs ("My name is Electra, and I'm a Femme Fatale") and the Jon Jon Diaries (although, sadly, "Jon Jon has to go away for a while"). The Yahoo Webring Directory ( dir.webring.yahoo.com/rw ) has all kinds: Quotations; Wiccans; Golden Retrievers (the Circle of Gold). A hundred lifetimes could be lost in here.
If you're a fan of Luke Rhinehart's The Dice Man, and all this seems too predetermined, there are sites that give you a far more random experience. At www.maths.tcd.ie/cgi-bin/randurl you can see pages taken at random from the http cache of the University of Dublin Trinity College School of Mathematics. For students, they seem to be a suspiciously clean-living lot - the results are mainly academic sites, and fascinatingly dull, although you do get the odd surprise: on click 27, I reached www.sunbelt.net - a site I can honestly say I would otherwise never have seen. Try it for yourself.
At Yahoo Random! you will find a unique destination taken from Yahoo's database of millions of websites across the world - instant sightseeing, and you don't need to pay for a ticket. With one estimate (see www.glreach.com/globstats) running at 369.4 million web users whose searches you can spy on, and 3-billion-plus web pages to randomly visit, there's now no excuse for learning just one new thing every day. As Mae West would have said: log on and see me sometime. (Although she might have wanted your credit card number first.)
