The Surf with a Stranger function could be offered by google, wikipedia, halfbakery or some other catholic and well visited web entity. On activation, you would receive the outputs being requested by someone else - a randomly chosed IP address currently using the site. Of course once you start following with that person, if he clicks onto a site, then started clicking around in that site you would not see what they do - nor would you read text inputs etc. When the stranger returned to google you would once again see what he or she sees.
Your stranger would be good for a finite time period, then you would be switched to another IP address. The IP addresses are hidden, to avoid the possibility of stalking someone.-- bungston, Sep 21 2007 Baked, then splashed http://www.aswellbu.../testsite/index.php [normzone, Sep 21 2007] Designing for Sociability in Shared Browsing (PDF) https://research.mi...hared%20Browser.pdfThis Microsoft Research paper talks about similar stuff. Note the list of references at the end: there are papers on shared browsing at least a decade old. [krelnik, Sep 21 2007] Surfing is a personal thing. Tag team surfing is just wrong on so many levels. Even if you masked the text input, a stranger could read your email along with you in tandem and figure out enough about you to know more than you would want him to know.-- Jscotty, Sep 21 2007 No email viewing. Imagine the HB offered such a service. I could go along to various ideas you visit, so long as they were in the HB site. The HB has no power to show me your email. Likewise Google - if you clicked a link to a site that you found on a google search I would go to that site as well, but I would not be able to see what you did once you were there. Google would not know that either, and so could not show it to me.-- bungston, Sep 21 2007 <splashes playfully [bungston]> if you pissed in this water...-- po, Sep 21 2007 Research on WYSIWIS (What You See Is What I See) interfaces dates back to at least 1987. (See references in the linked paper).-- krelnik, Sep 21 2007 That is interesting, [krelnik]. I wonder if there is some programming problem that prevents this from being implemented.
Of course this community thing is different from the remora-like thing I propose.
/if you pissed in this water/ - No! Or not just now, anyway.-- bungston, Sep 21 2007 There are two types of divers. Those that pee in their wetsuits, and those that lie about it.-- normzone, Sep 22 2007 I like ideas that involve strangers, they have the best candy.-- pyggy potamus, Nov 13 2007 One simple way to implement this is by providing a special browser, which contained two features: 1) It used a proxy server for all requests. This technology already exists. 2) The proxy server is hosted on the buddy's machine. The buddy's machine display's the response, too.
Should be relatively simple to implement, and won't double bandwidth usage like other solutions do.-- aguydude, Aug 28 2008 Maybe let people chat with others that did similar searches?-- Bcrosby, Aug 28 2008 If I am searching for an answer... why would I want to chat with people that also don't know the answer?-- astronot, Aug 28 2008 //If I am searching for an answer... why would I want to chat with people that also don't know the answer?// If you don't know the answer to that then you are definitely at the wrong website.-- DrBob, Aug 28 2008 Overcoming all the objections: How about "now viewing" - like on YouTube?-- pashute, May 13 2009 random, halfbakery