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sábado, 19 de abril de 2014

Merriam-Webster Dictionary: Quick Quiz about words

Acclaimed and venerable Merriam-Webster Dictionary has launched a campaign called Quick Quiz about words 

They say in their website http://www.m-w.comEach week on Facebook and Twitter we post a Quick Quiz about words. Here are some of our readers’ favorites.

Question #1:


Add one letter to "fast" to create a word with the opposite meaning. The answer is... "feast".

Read more at http://www.merriam-webster.com/top-ten-lists/top-10-our-most-popular-quick-quizzes/fast-question.html?&t=1397915067#YqjldEeOGkV6974F.99


The End.

domingo, 13 de abril de 2014

PDB Combos, or "Pseudo-Databases Combos"


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████████COME█████ON!██████████
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PDB Combos, or "Pseudo-Databases Combos" 

Pseudo-databases are different from fake databases. Fake databases are real databases with fake / false data. I will be calling "pseudo-databases" to files with real data, but they will have only the look or resemblance of a database.

However, in an underlying layer, computers will be managing / operating / re-arranging, real databases.


At the bottom, I have written something about a loosely-related-to-this-stuff  "SECRET".

An open and free project has been started. It can be copied, replicated, partially or totally mirrored in other websites, modified, re-indexed, re-arranged, renamed, filtered, shortened, enlarged, manipulated, et cetera, "echoed" anytime, everywhere, by anyone; id est, anyone can build his/her own "PDB Combo".

Absolutely NO copyright.

It has to do with the building of several or many REAL databases by "brewing" a combo of pseudo-databases composed of several items,

(1) being one of them, an adaptation of the idea and concept coined by computer scientists Eric Freeman and David Gelernter (1955- ) —the last one, a non-fatal victim of Ted Kaczynski (1940- ), a.k.a. "the Unabomber"—, who like to think about the future of important sections of the web as Lifestreams. They launched their project-proposal at Yale University (New Haven, CT 06520), in the mid-1990s: ... a chronological-ordered stream of documents that funcions as a diary of your electronic life...

http://cs-www.cs.yale.edu/homes/freeman/lifestreams.html#origin


http://old.sigchi.org/bulletin/1996.1/fertig.html

SIGCHI (in the above line) stands for Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction.


(2) another element can be the inclusion of YOUR OWN Webtiger's mark —WTM— (not an obligation, of course, but highly recommendable) in all of your websites (or almost all of your websites), webpages, blogs, texts, documents, writings, posts, messages, Facebook wall, videos, images, photographs, links software, et cetera... even in your tweets.


beta3625169410

beta3625169410 

My personal Webtiger's mark (WTM) is beta3625169410 (a string of characters formed by the name of the second letter of the Greek alphabet, and seven numbers squared, in inverted order). 

A Webtiger's mark is a string of unique characters.

—You can find many of my writings and some images/pictures, by typing in the search box of Google this: beta3625169410; then, you would be able to follow the links. 

I invite you to create a unique mark, your personal Webtiger's mark, so the public/readers will be identifying more easily your  websites, webpages, blogs, texts, documents, writings, posts, messages, Facebook walls, videos, images, photographs, links software, et cetera... even your tweets... except, of course, those files, albums... you want to keep confidential, semihidden, or revealed only to a few.

My personal mark would be the "smell" of my urine if I were a tiger which marks territories by urinating on trees. 

Tigers are known for marking their respective territories by urinating on trees. 

(Please click on the below image in order to enlarge it.)




You can copy these paragraphs (with slight [or major] modifications for the convenience of you and for the benefit of your readers, friends, acquaintances, customers, et cetera) and the above image, which shows a urinating Web tiger, and paste them in some or all of your websites.

Or you can create another image...

... and, what will your Webtiger's mark be?

Let us say that you know a Peter R. Sands; well, the WTM of Peter could be peterrsands19881110%#. He was born on the Tenth day of November, 1988, et cetera. This WTM would be similar in its uniqueness to the "smell" of a tiger's "urine" in the cyber jungle.

There are many ways to create a WTM.

So, the idea goes on like this: if you type Peter's WTM in the search box of Google, peterrsands19881110%#, and his documents, videos, et cetera, should appear in the first links shown to you by the search engine.

If in the future, Webtigers' marks (WTM's) do not perform as expected/are not useful, they can be discarded, thrown into the electronic waste basket or tossed into the sea...

Of course the above phrases have been typed in order to "prove" that a WTM can be useful to quickly find websites, webpages, images, works, et cetera, created by the owner of such WTM.

(3) PLUS a juxtaposition of COLUMNS and ROWS filled with answers to some of the seven questions asked by Latin rhetorician Marcus Fabius Quintilianus (Calahorra, Spain, c. 30-?, c. 100) in his famous hexameter: Quis, quid, ubi, quibus auxiliis, cur, quomodo, quando?, namely, Who, what, where, by what means, why, how (in what way), when?

In Latin Rethoric, these questions are called circumstances, and their respective answers are considered fundamental in information-gathering, journalism, history, criminal investigation, et cetera; they constitute a formula for knowing the complete story of a subject.

Now, one of the main reasons for calling those grid-like renderings of COLUMNS and ROWS, pseudo-databases and not databases, is that they, in fact, will be shown as the results or renderings or "visual aspects" of REAL databases, but without the "paraphernalia" or heavy weight in terms of megabytes, gigabytes, terabytes, of REAL databases, which can be manipulated, re-arranged, re-indexed, et cetera, in multiple ways, by using database software, Base (OpenOffice), Microsoft Access, or Calc* (the spreadsheet software by OpenOffice), Excel,* or even SQL.

*Strictly speaking, these programs do not constitute database management software, but they can be used as such. Also, they are more user-friendly.

A chronologically indexed database would answer to the "WHEN" part of the hexameter, and that procedure can be paired or equaled with the idea or scientists Freeman and Gelertner, "a time-oriented stream of documents..."

The keyword in Freeman and Gelernter's idea is the chronological order ("WHEN") but in fact, your REAL databases can be indexed in a number of ways, exempli gratia, according to the data of each and all of the columns in each database. So, in the end you can have a set of results, as many as the number of columns each one of your databases has.

As far as I can tell, I have found that one of the most user-friendly and best programs to manage small or short databases, is Excel, though it is not exactly a database manager.

However, Excel is limited by the maximum number of rows a listing can contain: 65,536.

Databases can be alphabetically indexed according to the data entered in each of several COLUMNS, by subordinating the columns of your choice.

But, if you apply exclusively the idea of scientists Freeman and Gelernter, of a time-oriented stream of documents, you can easily avoid the use of databases, Excel, et cetera, and just keep adding new data (by typing, copying and pasting, et cetera) to your lifestream, to your ROWS and COLUMNS. —That's the great advantage of Freeman&Gelernter's idea.

Obviously, that idea and its application has its pros and cons.

(4) PLUS a collection of the first 50 words only, of each website, not all of them, a different work than the actions of Googlebots, which download entire webpages of websites, to index the word these webpages contain...

This will be that way (first 50 words only), as a measure to not overcharge REAL databases, which should be lighter.

An example of the rendering of a REAL database query, shown in the form of a pseudo-database, would look like this:

Chronol.       Personage    
WHEN          WHO           WHAT      WHERE                     BRANCH      URL
19860128    Challenger  exploded atm. over N. Atlantic  aeronautics  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_Challenger_disaster
19860128    McAuliffe    died        atm. over N. Atlantic   aeronautics  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_Challenger_disaster
19860128    Scobee       died        atm. over N. Atlantic   aeronautics  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_Challenger_disaster
16870705    Newton       gravity    London                        physics         http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_gravitation
16751111    Leibniz       calculus  Paris?                          math            http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gottfried_Wilhelm_Leibniz#Calculus
16661000*  Newton       calculus  London                        math            http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_Newton#Mathematics

When you do not know the exact date of a deed, you can type/use two zeroes for the day, and also two zeroes for the month, if you only know the year. Also, if you do not know the year, you can write something like this 11780000? (circa 1178). For years before Christ (B.C.) or before common era (BCE), you should write a minus (-) sign before the number, v.g., -4296.

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The point or "node" is that companies such as:

yahoo.com, bing.com, ask.com, cuil.com.co, www.hotbot.com, google.com, kosmix.com, hakia.com, lexxe.com, answers.com/bb, wolframalpha.com, deeppeep.org, clusty.com, http://blindsearch.fejus.com, duckduckgo.com, yauba, hunch.com, oneriot, scoopler, powerset, et cetera, 

keep their databases concealed. Yes, it is their right, they have invested a lot of money to create software, gather information, download it, index it, keep it stored, et cetera, but we, the general public, can do something about that.

Is this a proposal for a Google killer? Absolutely not, instead, we could play the role of "remoras that swim along with sharks", taking advantage of search engines.


(5) PLUS a virtual Web phantom.

(6) PLUS a virtual chip that will connect some or all of your websites among each other, and also to ... ?

I have forgotten the last part of this idea. Hope to recall it at a later time... ññ


— —

While scientists do not create a software or a metasoftware which automatically indexes data and info, and send them from the millions of websites to a general repository, we should continue using the services of the major search engines.

It seems that such parasoftware or panacean (cure-all) software or "accelerator" is still faraway, so meanwhile, perhaps it would be necessary to apply a revolutionary method, like the one that was applied, in other field, by Norweigan explorer Roald Amundsen, who took along with his team —besides a food invented by North American indians, called Pemmican (fat and protein)— a strange kind of food: a living, running food: 27 of the 45 remaining sled dogs, which he and his team killed for food, December, 1911, in a place they called The Butchers' Shop, at 85º 36', close to the South Pole.

If we aim to create "enzymes" specific for certain "substrates", maybe we will be speaking of a thematic indexation of the web, represented in the fifth column headed by the word "BRANCH" in the above, six-column example, while Freeman and Gelernter focuse on a chronogical-ordered stream, the "WHEN" (first) column.

Sure, there already is an Open Directory Project at http://www.dmoz.org/ but its possibilities of editing and adding articles are restricted.

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██████████████████████ Now, please let me share the promised "SECRET" with you:
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Now, please let me share the promised "SECRET" with you:

It has to do with YouTube.

Nowadays, YouTube is growing by several terabytes a day. 

Videos are so heavy, that the YouTube bandwidth usage is of many petabytes per month.

Starting in 2010 and continuing to the present, Alexa ranked YouTube as the third most visited website on the internet, behind Google and Facebook.

On March 21, 2013, the number of unique users visiting YouTube every month reached one billion; more than 33 millions per day. 

It is estimated that 108,000 hours of new videos are uploaded to the site every day.

Some industry commentators speculate that YouTube is losing several million dollars a day.

That being said...


It does not matter, YouTube can be used as a great, "very liquid" and faster vehicle for the expansion and divulgation of your ideas, promotions, business, et cetera, which can be known fastly and easily by others, as the Googlebots or "spiders" give preference to crawling and indexing their sibling websites, id est, YouTube, blogger/blogspot...

So, here are the good news: you can upload a fifteen-to-thirty-second video —it can be a real video, showing for example, a fish swimming in a fish bowl, complemented/accompanied by a fragment of a Bach or Mozart sonata (less than 15 seconds long, and repeat that part if necessary, so you will not violate © Copyright),

[...]

or a pseudo-video made up of grey, blue, violet or whatever color squares drawn in Paint with a few phrases or sentences typed on them, and assembled as a "video" by using the program called Windows Movie Maker or a similar one.

[...]

or a real video recorded by yourself, which can be recorded with your webcam or your cellular phone camera, for example, let us say, at 10:00 p.m., in the most complete darkness of your office/living room/studio/bedroom, you can light an incense stick, point your lit LED (light-emitting diode) lamp/lintern towards the ascending smoke, and let the camera record that, then you can edit, mix, add your favorite classical or por music as the soundtrack, et cetera.

Now, once you have composed/arranged your video or "video", HERE comes the MOST IMPORTANT part: 

You will have to type the info, promotional phrases, announcements, et cetera, about your business/idea/project inside the "Description" of the video, below the Heading, you will become a WORDCASTER, your words, your message, shall have to be revealed, spread in the DESCRIPTION section of the video or "video" you will be uploading (which is not so important, in this case).

Please hark onto me, do not hesitate, go dare and do things quick, dirty and fast; do not wait for the perfect product/market/time, ignore the naysayers...

Start with a catchy phrase, so readers will want to open the text by clicking on the line which reads "Show More", and keep scrolling down the text by using their mouse... and reading...

In the Description section, maybe you will not be able to spell out some complete URL's, such as www.anywebsite.com but you can type them as, triple w DOT anywebsite DOT c o m  OR w w w DOT anywebsite DOT  c o m      et cetera.

UNDER CONSTRUCTION...

<a href="http://somethingormore.blogspot.com.w3snoop.com/"><img src="http://www.w3snoop.com/pr/somethingormore.blogspot.com" width="99" height="30" alt=""/></a>

14ff178336405a174914c3f83f5f56ab0ee0775ae7f39e3a4b



jueves, 27 de marzo de 2014

A Webtiger's mark


beta3625169410

beta3625169410 

My personal Webtiger's mark is beta3625169410 (a string of characters formed by the name of the second letter of the Greek alphabet, and seven numbers squared, in inverted order). 

—You can find many of my writings and some images/pictures, by typing in the search box of Google this: beta3625169410; then, you will be able to follow the links. 

I invite you to create a unique mark, your personal Webtiger's mark, so the public/readers will be identifying more easily your websites, webpages, texts, images, photographs, videos, messages, links, et cetera.

My personal mark would be the "smell" of my urine if I were a tiger which marks territories by urinating on trees. 

Tigers are known for marking their territory by urinating on trees. 

(Please click on the below image in order to enlarge it.)




You can copy these paragraphs (with slight [or major] modifications for the convenience of you and for the benefit of your readers, friends, acquaintances, customers, et cetera) and the above image, which shows a urinating Web tiger, and paste them in some or all of your websites.

Or you can create another image...

... and, what your Webtiger's mark will be?

Now, I will sprinkle/pour some incense smoke on me:*

*Vanitas vanitatum, dixit Qoheleth, vanitas vanitatum et omnia vanitas. (Liber Ecclesiastes, I, 2)

I think this idea of a Webtiger's mark could turn into the thirty-second greatest idea/event in importance since the beginning.

1. Creation of angels.
2. Creation of the universe, or Big Bang.
3. Creation/apparition of human beings.
4. Invention of language.
5. Invention of the alphabet/abecedary.
6. Invention of numbers.

7. Heliocentrism.
Aristarchus of Samos (310 B.C.-230 B.C.), a Greek astronomer and mathematician. To our knowledge, he was the first person to postulate the heliocentric model for the Solar System, eighteen centuries before Polish astronomer Copernicus did.

8. Redemption of the human species (about 30, A.D.).

9. Invention of zero .
The invention of the number 0 (zero) is credited to Indian mathematician and astronomer Aryabhatta (476-550 A.D.). The Arabs learned about the zero from India, and took that knowledge to Europe after 800 A.D. The major contribution of Aryabhatta is the zero, so it became immortal. He did not use the symbol, but French mathematician Georges Ifrah argues that the knowledge of the zero was implicit in the place value system as a place holder for the powers of 10 with null coefficients. The assumption is based on two facts: first, the invention of his alphabetical counting system would have been impossible without the zero or the place-value system; secondly, Aryabhatta performs calculations of square and cubic roots which are impossible if numbers in question are not written according to the place-value system and the zero.

The first evidence of use of the symbol we know today as zero: 0, dates from the seventh century, common era (C.E.).

10. Laws on elliptical orbits of planets and satellites. German astronomer, physicist, and mathematician Johannes Kepler, in 1609.
11. Laws of universal gravitation. Sir Isaac Newton.
12. The first vaccine, against smallpox, by English physician Edward Jenner , the "father of immunology" (1796).
13. Antisepsis by using phenol (also named carbolic acid) on wounds, hands of surgeons, nurses, surgical equipment, et cetera, by English physician Joseph Lister (1867) .
14 . Evolution of Species (Charles Darwin, 1859; Alfred R. Wallace).
15 . Electrical machines and other electric inventions, by Serb-American electrical engineer, physicist, and inventor Nikola Tesla (1856-1943).
16. General theory of relativity, by physicist Albert Einstein (1915).

17. God, uncreated (1923). 

French Catholic intellectualist philosopher Jacques Maritain (11/18/1882-04/28/1973), educated in Protestantism, then he was an agnostic, and by the age of 23, in 1906, converted to Catholicism. 


In the chapter Ontology: substance and accident, of his work Éléments de philosophie, I: Introduction générale à la philosophie, 1920, II. L'ordre des concepts (Petite logique), 1923, Maritain states that God exists a se, or by Himself, who has in Himself the whole explanation of his existence; He is uncaused, only God exists by Himself, a se; neither in se nor per se.

18. Antibiotics. Accidental discovery and isolation of penicillin in September, 1928, by Scottish biologist and pharmacologist Sir Alexander Fleming.

19. Nuclear fission, by chemists Otto Hahn, Fritz Strassmann (both German), Lise Meitner (Austrian), in January, 1939.

20. Transistor, in 1947, by William B. Shockley (1910-1999), Walter H. Brattain (1902-1987), John Bardeen (1908-1991).

21. Structure of DNA, 1953; RNA.

22. ARPANET*, the "mother" of the internet, 1969, by Vinton Cerf (1943- ), Robert E. Kahn (1938- ), and others.
*Advanced Research Projects Agency Net.

23. First ARPANET electronic mail (e-mail) sent, 1971.

24. First online chat* system, Talkomatic, at the University of Illinois, in 1974.  
*conversational hypertext access technology.

25. Modem (modulator-demodulator), in 1977, by Dennis C, Hayes (1950- ).

26. Personal computer (PC), by IBM, in 1981.

27. World wide web (www). 1990.
In today's brave, fast-paced, web-based world, praise to Tim Berners-Lee (London, 1955- ), of the CERN, Centre Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire, near Geneva, Switzerland, for having created the world wide web (www, an important part of the internet, but not to be confused with this one) in 1990, and for having simply given it all away for free to the world, only promoting its wider use.

28. Search engines. The first one was Archie ("Archive" without the "v", in 1990); Excite, infoseek, Altavista, Galaxy, WebCrawler, Yahoo!, Lycos, Google, HotBot, Ask, Cuil, Bing...

29. Web browsers, from 1994: Netscape, Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, Chrome...

30. Blogs.

31. Social nets.
LinkedIn, launched on 05/05/2003.
Orkut, founded on 01/24/2004 (Brazil, India).
Facebook, founded on 02/04/2004.
YouTube, founded on 02/14/2005.
Twitter, founded on 03/21/2006.

32. The Webtiger's mark (oh, vanity), proposed on Thursday, 03/27/2014.


Web Phantom

I have a dream (please pardon me for copying a Martin Luther King's phrase):

That some day someone (who?) can create some kind of "Web Phantom" —a special software— that automatically send the first 50 words of each website to a huge repository of visible, manipulatable-by-all-of-the-users, shareable, modifiable, crystal-clear, see-thru, free databases, not hidden to the public eye hidden are the databases of Google, Ask, Bing, Yahoo!, et cetera.

miércoles, 29 de enero de 2014

51? functions of a cellular phone

A cellular or mobile phone, a MULTIFUNCTIONAL electronic device, is or may be used as :
(not all of the phones have all of the functions listed below)

1 cordless phone that operates through airwaves

2 radio transmitter
3 radio receiver

4 computer (to browse the internet, send and receive electronic mails, chat...)

5 virtual arcade/virtual casino

6 electronic typewriter

7 word processor
8 viewer of texts
9 issuer/sender of texts (messages)
10 receiver of texts (messages)
11 texts' archive/file or repository/manager of texts (messages)

12 photographic camera
13 viewer of photographs/images
14 issuer/sender of photographs
15 receiver of photographs
16 photographs' file/repository/manager of photos

17 video camera
18 video player
19 video sender/issuer
20 video receiver
21 videorecorder, camcorder/video repository/manager of videos

22 audio recorder/recorder of sounds/phonograms or sonograms
23 audio player
24 issuer/sender of audio archives
25 receiver of audio archives
26 audio archive/repository/manager of phonograms or sound files

27 operator/runner of applications*
*for example, a cell phone can support blood pressure monitors —having previously downloaded the appropriate application
http://www.consumerreports.org/cro/news/2012/03/new-blood-pressure-monitors-work-with-your-cell-phone/index.htm

28 television set, to watch television online
http://electronicdesign.com/blog/how-watch-tv-your-cell-phone (an April 6, 2013 newspaper article).

29 clock
30 alarm/wake alarm 
31 stopwatch
32 timer is a rememberer, which remembers you of how many minutes left for anything (exempli gratia, cooking);
—Now, independent timers (not integrated into cell phones) can be integrated into conventional ovens, microwave ovens, washers, dryers; also, they can be used as simulators of human presence, allowing an electronic device (such as a radio receiver or a light) remains lit, to prevent theft

33 calendar

34 calculator

35 lamp

36 phone book, directory (contacts)
37 schedule of tasks
38 log
39 converter (sometimes automatic) of currency by multiplication and division according to the exchange rates
40 converter (sometimes automatic) of temperature scales
41 control for electronic devices (television set, video player, refrigerator, microwave oven... ), for example, to switch channels when watching television

42 document/image/picture scanner
43 fax
http://home.howstuffworks.com/scan-fax-using-camera-phone.htm

44 barcode reader
45 dot matrix or two-dimensional barcodes' reader, QR, Quick Response
46 geolocator

47 buzzer/vibrator

48 compass
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compass
in the caption below the second picture the Wikipedian file quoted immediately above, you can read: "A smartphone that can be used as a compass because of the magnetometer inside"

49 translator
50 interpreter

51 secretary: sometimes, a cell phone can replace a human secretary, just when anyone is using an intelligent personal assistant, such as:

Braina;
Apple’s Siri;
Microsoft Cortana;
Google Now;
Amazon Echo;
LG's Voice Mate;
Microsoft Cortana;
Samsung's S Voice;
HTC's Hidi;
SILVIA.




To know the IMEI (International Mobile Equipment Identity*) of any mobile or cellular phone, and other electronic devices:

*Sometimes: International Mobile Station Equipment Identity.

Press *#06#   ... and hey presto!

Asterisk, number sign,* zero, six, number sign.

*or pound symbol, or noughts-and-crosses sign, or tic-tac-toe sign


Write down the 15-digit IMEI number of your electronic device, and keep the piece of paper in your closet, or in a drawer of your desk,  ... or send it to yourself, to your e-mail address. One or both of these measures will prove to be useful when notifying the telephone company so that they can disable your device in case it is stolen.

The IMEI number is a 15-digit one, a unique number assigned to a mobile.


Sometimes, the acronym SVN (software version number) also appears, followed by a two-digit number.




Added on purpose (not a mistake):

Synonyms for...:

archive
attic
cabinet
cellar
closet
cupboard
registry
repository
store
warehouse

sábado, 25 de enero de 2014

A Google killer?

A Google killer?

No.

Maybe this one could be just a pseudo-killer, a straight competitor of that search engine called Google. It is as follows:

(1A)* you need to create a free application, at no cost for future users, which will be sending the first 50 words of the users's webpages/websites to

(2) your pre-created website, which will be like a pool or container of visible, crystal-clear, see-thru, 100-percent-transparent databases (an importante difference when compared with the databases of Google, Yahoo, Bing, et cetera, which are hidden, opaque).

(3) I am speaking about the first 50 words only, for the databases do not result heavy, but light (in terms of gigabytes or terabytes or petabytes).

(4) Once your website is stepping on the gas/sprinting, your metasoftware will receive, index, manipulate, classify, and manage the data, and

(5) it will show the real databases after retrieving data, to users. This can be done in at least two ways: (A) rendering of a copy of your real and manipulatable databases (this occupies more space/memory/bytes), or (B) showing a non-manipulatable read-only pseudo-database built out from your real database (this consume less space/memory/bytes).

*(1B) Or your software can send a robot or spider to "crawl" websites/webpages in search for the first 50 words of each webpage.