Move over, Google- I've found a new way to browse the web.

Gnod is a self-adapting search engine that suggests various books, movies, musical groups, and websites based on your likes and dislikes, sort of like the recommendations you get on Amazon, but more sophisticated and less busy. I especially like how you can give Gnod three of anything (authors, bands, et cetera), and it will then generate a string of suggestions that you can agree with or disagree with, so that the artificial intelligence learns what you're really interested in, and is able to refine its selections for you beyond the simple "Readers who liked this also liked this" rubric. At any rate, it's fun to play with:

I plug in the following three authors: Sophocles, Raymond Chandler, H.P. Lovecraft

And here's what I get-

1. Jude Watson
2. Edgar Allen Poe
3. Rimbaud
4. Baudelaire
5. Sacher Masoch
6. Flaubert
7. Jacques Derrida
8. Gunter Wallraff
9. Wolfgang Haffner
10. Marquis de Sade
11. George Lucas
12. Anton La Vey

Now that's pretty eclectic. And a tad disturbing (The Marquis de Sade? Anton La Vey? George Freaking Lucas?). But there's a real gem in there as well. Gunter Wallraff is a radical German journalist who adopted a fake identity in order to infiltrate The Daily Standard - the most influential newspaper in Western Europe during the Cold War - and exposed it as nothing more than a massive propaganda machine. This story may sound familiar to you, as a 1990 film The Man Inside, starring Jurgen Prochnow and Peter Coyote, is a retelling of Wallraff's undercover adventure. Wallraff is considered to be a pioneer and a towering figure in the field of modern journalism, and yet until Gnod dropped his name I'd never heard of the guy. Another interesting tidbit about him is that he was an outspoken critic of the military junta which took control of Greece - with America's blessing and the CIA's help, no less - in 1967, and was arrested while participating in an anti-junta demonstration in Syntagma Square in Athens in 1974. These days he's been dogging Turkey's government for its brutal war against the Kurds and Turkish treatment of Kurdish separatist leader Abdullah Ocalan. A good guy. And thanks to Gnod, I now know a little about him. This is how the web should work.

Oh, yeah, and while I'm at it, here's another diamond in the electronic rough- HomeStarRunner, one of the funniest and best-designed websites I've seen in ages, with toons, downloads, games that will keep you in stitches for hours. Even the main page comes in 15 different interactive versions! By all means check out Strong Bad, an animated Mexican wrestler who answers his fan email. Thanks to The Flaky Librarian for this link!