The Search Engine Belt Buckle

It was a late August Saturday night in Seattle, we decided not only to hit the dance floor, but boogie on down in a whole new way. All the cats in town are wearing big belt buckles now, so we thought, hey, here's our chance to show the world our latest hack, the Search Engine Belt Buckle.

What is the Search Engine Belt Buckle?
The Search Engine Belt Buckle is a PDA which shows 24 hours of all the bizarre and banal things people are looking for on the web. Art project or pointless hack? That's for you to decide, but all we know is that people are searching for some pretty freaky stuff out there, so why not put in a belt buckle and get on the scene like a sex machine?

So, these are all search terms that people were looking for that are now appearing on our belt buckle.

"olympic nude athletes"
"leaving the scene of an accident"
"night diaper bondage"
"food"
"used juicer"
"catfighting lesbians"
"disorder cutting self injury"

The Search Engine Belt Buckle has enough battery power to last for about 2 to 3 hours, plenty of time for gettin' on down and it's sure to attract the ladies (or the gents as it were). If there's WiFi it can stream in live queries, but since that's always an unknown, we have a few hours of search queries on hand at all times.

This technically isn't one of our HOW-TO's, but we will show you how we made the Search Engine Belt Buckle.

Making the Search "video" for the belt buckle
First we captured 24 hours worth of video, which was search terms going by on a specific part of our screen.

Special note: Yah, we coulda grabbed the XML from the SWF and made a new app to do display all the stuff, but we wanted to make this approachable for other folks out there do this. By making this a video file we can display it on a wider variety of systems and mediums.

Using Windows Media Encoder 9 series (free) we specified a specific region of our screen to get captured. After you download and install the Windows Media Encoder, start it up and in the Wizard Menu choose "Capture Screen".

In the next menu choose "Region of the Screen".

Set your browser to "SearchSpy" here. Click the "Use selection button" and drag an outline around the search goodness.

A bit of warning, as if you had any doubts before, people are sick monkeys, you'll see some of the most amazingly gross and perverse queries. After recording these for 24 hours and watching them, the only thing we could think of was to put it on a belt buckle and dance, dance, dance.

After you choose the area, pick a name for the file, click next and then choose a type of encoding, we picked "Medium" since it doesn't really matter with text that will be on a belt buckle.

Fill in the title, author and all that good stuff. Then click finish.

Now you're recording all the searches in real time. When you think you've got enough (how much is ever enough, really) click the Encoder app on the task bar and stop the recording.

Here's a 10 minute sample (Windows Media).

Now, we'll want to recode it to play full screen on a Pocket PC in the Windows Media Player.

Close the Windows Media Encoder and start it back up again, in the Wizard click "Convert a file" click browse and choose the file you just made. Click next, choose Pocket PC.

In the next Window, use the pull down list and choose "Pocket PC widescreen video (CBR)". This will make the video 320 x 240.

Click Finish and you're off to encoding.

When it's done, move that file to the Pocket PC, we popped ours on a SD card.

In File Explorer click the file, it will start to play, but click stop.

In Windows Media on the Pocket PC tap Tools > Settings > Audio & Video. In the pull down list choose "Continue Playback" and Play video in full screen "always". Tap OK.

Tap Tools > Repeat. Don't press play yet.

Now, we need to turn off the Power Management stuff. Tap the Start Menu > Settings, System tab > Power. We unchecked "Turn off device is not used for...".

Then tap "Backlight" and uncheck "Turn off backlight if device is not used for". This will keep the device on until you press the power button or you run out of juice.

Click OK, then tap the Start Menu and the Windows Media icon. Tap play and your search video will play as long as you want it to and be rotated to the right for optimal belt buckle viewing.

If you want, you can also adjust the brightness (depending on the vibe).

And lastly, you can always edit the video and do other things, colors and effects. Maybe we'll do another version with pictures.

Making the Belt Buckle
Now, you don't need to make a belt buckle, you could just have this sit on your desk or play the video on any device, it's mesmerizing.

We couldn't resist the temptation to make a big-ass belt buckle...We grabbed some stuff and were off.

So we wrapped the Pocket PC in black tape...

...and then hot glued shiny beads to the outside.

On the back we used adhesive velcro, and placed the other side on a belt we had.

And there it is, the Search Engine Belt Buckle.

We might make a smaller one with another Pocket PC we get from Ebay, but for now this seems to be working out just dandy. Seeya on the flipside stella.

---

Phillip Torrone can be reached via his personal site: http://www.flashenabled.com and/or [e-mail]

[Andy Beal @ Dec 19th 2005 2:26AM]

As a certified search engine junkie, I can think of no finer fashion accessory!

[Jody @ Dec 19th 2005 2:26AM]

Looks like the person in this shot pee'd their pants.

[B @ Dec 19th 2005 2:26AM]

...or are you just happy to see me?

[Joey Jones @ Dec 19th 2005 2:26AM]

What a curious and fascinating waste of time and money!

[Josh Santangelo @ Dec 19th 2005 2:26AM]

Cute! There has got to be a way to get those results as text, though. It would probably be easier on the battery to display them that way too. Display might be as simple as making an HTML page with some of those horrible marquee tags, and open it up on Pocket IE. That would also take a ton less memory, so you could do it on a cheaper device.

It's a wonderful alpha, though!

[Craig @ Dec 19th 2005 2:26AM]

You fuckin rock dude... I'll be reading your blog for the rest of my life.

[Chris @ Dec 19th 2005 2:26AM]

Regarding projects that are totally useless wasted and stupid, yet in a mysterious way _incredible_ cool, I think this one is going to be a classic. I really got to get me one of these. . . .

[Steven K. @ Dec 19th 2005 2:26AM]

Perhaps it would be beneficial to create a flash animation which grabs the search terms from a text file. This way you are not limited strictly to text alone, you could also animate or color code terms on the fly.

Anyways who am I to say?

Cool hack.

-t7

[Matthew @ Dec 19th 2005 2:26AM]

Stylin!

[uodeltasig @ Dec 19th 2005 2:26AM]

If you want something interesting to take to the club, I would setup the microphone jack to grab the sound that is playing and turn on the winamp visulations fullscreen so it reacts to the music.

To make this a 'hack' you have to do something better then capturing video with windows media player. Python is designed to be easy to learn, so even if your not a programmer you can google a few search tutz (watch it come up on your belt) and then learn how to grab the text from the site.

Josh made a good point, output the last 10 - 20 in a text file, then you can use flash to animate the text with actionscript. Again any non-programmer can do this, google it and make it happen.

If you want to learn how to do this cheap on an LCD check out http://www.crystalfontz.com/

[LL @ Dec 19th 2005 2:26AM]

This is a really cool idea, but what I really want to know is who keeps searching on the word "Food". And it shows up like 5 times in the sample video. What could you possibly hope to find and why do it multiple times?

[Andrew G @ Dec 19th 2005 2:26AM]

Kind of like a male chastity belt...

[levein @ Dec 19th 2005 2:26AM]

Why people are always interested in others' privacy? just a news of several days ago, South African students listen to others' conversation over cell phone.

[lewisb @ Dec 19th 2005 2:26AM]

dudes, you could like add wmp visuals, /w the search text, maybe tv graphics, for a full on trance inducing, drool causing crotch staring session! I'm in, babey!!!!!!!!!!

[Dez Blanchfield @ Dec 19th 2005 2:26AM]

Oh for the love of Larry ( god's first name! ),

I almost wet my pants laughing when I saw this, it's just too darn funny for words.

I'm the whacked nutzoid behind both:

http://WebSearch.COM.AU

The Australian Search Engine

and

http://WebSearch.CO.NZ

The New Zealand Search Engine


As a now 10+ year self confessed search-aholic, and with now more than ten years ( http://WebSearch.COM.AU/about.html ) of search engine development for fun and nominal profit, I can honestly say that the very very last interface I could have ever imagined that man kind would have dreamed up for search engine data was a belt buckle PDA !!

You guys are "da bomb" and you rock big time.

Please do contact me by email to include my search engines for Australia and New Zealand in your search query strings data feed, as we have our very own bread of fun, filthy, and frivolity "down under" ;-)

Cheers,

Dez

[Nick Roosevelt @ Dec 19th 2005 2:26AM]

Well, it would be harder to implement, but I think the text should scroll around the belt, kind of like a display around a building in Time Square.

[Sam @ Dec 19th 2005 2:26AM]

Love the belt buckle idea. Better than search engine results (*yawn*), you should hook up a music visualizer to run on your belt buckle. Now THAT would be something worth dancing to.

[Pedro Marques @ Dec 19th 2005 2:26AM]

That belt owns u ass :D

[No Pee @ Dec 19th 2005 2:26AM]

No pee - just a shadow from the camera flash or overhead lights.

[gail @ Dec 19th 2005 2:26AM]

how very appropriate say the girls in the know..

[Jeff Clark @ Dec 19th 2005 2:26AM]

This is sick. Cool as hell, but sick.

...I'd probably wear it. Not gonna lie.

[Paul Saah @ Dec 19th 2005 2:26AM]

Manufacturer of custom belt buckles, crested pewter beer steins, engraved dog tags and pewter zipper pulls

[Rob Skelton @ Dec 19th 2005 2:26AM]

A big list of search engine spies - sites where you can see the latest search queries - is here:

SearchEngineZ: Search Engine Spy
http://searchenginez.com/spy.html

[cazz @ Dec 19th 2005 2:26AM]

Nice Belt Buckle But Try Getting It To Play Music Aswell, Micro Speakers, That would show them

[rico @ Dec 19th 2005 2:26AM]

Someone has a little too much time on their hands!

[Ruel Loehr @ Dec 19th 2005 2:26AM]

Hey,

I would like to do something similiar to this, but with real time search queries? Any idea of how to grab the real time queries??

[lucius black @ Dec 19th 2005 2:26AM]

wow

[Leslie @ Dec 19th 2005 2:26AM]

They have belt buckles now where you can type things in and it'll keep on going across like a screen saver. Have u heard about them? Do u know where 2 get them from?

[Fart Sniffer @ Dec 19th 2005 2:26AM]

You are a loser.

[Tiaadirah @ Dec 19th 2005 2:26AM]

I would like to say that is great idea that you have just create and that I wish you all the good luck in your new idea. Also can you tell me when do you think those kind of belt buckles are going to be on the market.

[tanya @ Dec 19th 2005 2:26AM]

leslie, go to namebeltonline.com.

good luck in your quest for your fashion faux pas! :)

[MASTERUDY @ Dec 19th 2005 2:26AM]

DEFINITIVELY WAY TO GO WITH THIS IDEA TAKE YOUR iPAQ AS A BUCKLE BELT TO PROJECT VIDEOS WHILE DANCING ON THE DISCO IT'S GROOVY AND COOL EXCELLENT IDEA THE COMPANIES THAT SELL GADGETS FOR iPAQS ARE ON A PRIMITIVE STAGE I HAVE MORE IDEAS THAN THAT UNFORTUNATELY COMPANIES DON'T CARE TO MAKE MONEY!

[Paul Sahh @ Dec 19th 2005 2:26AM]

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[Belt Buckles from Leatherbelts.com @ Dec 19th 2005 2:26AM]

Thats a very cool belt buckle. THE LED buckles are also pretty cool. But I personally like the more simple plain belt buckles.

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