Search Engine Poetry(SEP) is a new branch of poetry with fantastic possibilities. Poetry is all about finding beauty in the mundane world, and nowhere is this more true than here. Go to your favourite search engine, and search for a simple phrase, and at least one in ten of the results are likely to be accidental search engine poetry. For example, the exact phrase 'search engine poems' on a popular search engine provided this wonderful example, though the site itself is probably less than outstanding:

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Creating Search Engine Poetry - Method One

Such poetry occurs naturally wherever a website creator places high rankings in a search engine above such petty constraints as grammar and clarity. If grammar is not abandoned completely, then wonderfully tortous sentences are used instead. For example:

This is the number one site for all your garbage, rubbish, garbage, muck, waste, gunk, toxic waste, Garbage, excreta, by-products, dumps, bins, radioactivity, binmen, junk, gloop, faeces, pollution, compost heaps, mess, rubbish, gunge, rutting in pig swill, canals, shopping trolleys, garbage, trash, filth, cockroaches, chutes, vermin, recycling, George Bush, septic, landfill, incinerators, dumping, sniffing mouldy laundry baskets, and garbage needs.

This particular example features four of the classic features of good search engine poetry:

• Repetition of key words - in this case 'garbage'.
• One or two phrases that are totally unrelated to anything else, or indeed the site as a whole. In this case, 'George Bush' clearly has no relationship with turning pleasant natural environments into toxic radioactive gunge. Oh no.
• One or two phrases that are just mind-boggling unpleasant. In this case we can choose between 'rutting in pig swill' and 'sniffing mouldy laundry baskets'. I'd rather not.
• On a technical note, most of the words agree in part of speech. In this case we have a collection of plural nouns, but it might equally be past participles or adjectives.

But we aren't finished yet. The next stage is to filter it through the search engine, which refines it with a number of delicate alterations:

• Adding text that was never meant to be actually read, like the omni-present 'your browser is not configured to use frames'. Other sources of such text include various client-side scripts, disclaimers in ridiculously small text, and the like.
• Text from the 'alt' tag of pictures. Because pictures are normally cunningly distributed throughout the text to provide graphical relief before the reader is overwhelmed by text, the search engine does the same. Specifically, it distributes semi-random text throughout the text to provide utter confusion before the reader has any sense of understanding what the site might be about.
• The best tool in the search engine's box of tricks is to paste together two quite dissimilar chunks of text with a tiny ellipsis in the middle under the pretence of being helpful. It's this that transforms a work of confusion into one of inhuman genius.

Creating Search Engine Poetry - Method Two

Some fail to see the inherent beauty in search engine poetry discovered 'in the wild', as it were. They question whether a process involving solely search engine spiders and website developers - one, therefore, with absolutely no intelligent input at any stage - can really create poetry that fully expresses the human condition. For these elite, the alternative is poetry that is merely inspired by search engine poetry proper.

Researchers are invited to submit their own masterpieces, from either method, in the forums below, and I'll feature the 'best' here...