News:Ucsc: Dna Sequences In Web Pages Indexed By Bing.Com / Microsoft Research (All Phenotype And Literature Tracks)

Question

[Pierre Lindenbaum]

We BLATted the Internet! The DNA sequences from 40 billion webpages mapped to hg19 and other species: http://t.co/5XAsFCguE2

— UCSC Genome Browser (@GenomeBrowser) January 23, 2014

This track is powered by Bing! and Microsoft Research. UCSC collaborators at Microsoft Research (Bob Davidson, David Heckerman) implemented a DNA sequence detector and processed thirty days of web crawler updates, which covers roughly 40 billion webpages. The results were mapped with BLAT to the genome. Display Convention and Configuration

The track indicates the location of sequences on web pages mapped to the genome, labelled with the web page URL. If the web page includes invisible meta data, then the first author and a year of publication is shown instead of the URL. All matches of one web page are grouped ("chained") together. Web page titles are shown when you move the mouse cursor over the features. Thicker parts of the features (exons) represent matching sequences, connected by thin lines to matches from the same web page within 30 kbp.

Answer 1

[Mary]

I've been looking around, and it's certainly a mixed bag. I found a link to Fark. But someone left this comment on G+ that I thought was hilarious:

The ONLY logical conclusion to this is that the Internet is not only alive, but distantly related to humans. What would be cute is if they BLATed computer virus code next and found it had a greater gene density than regular websites.

Edit: Second best answer: http://twitter.com/popupcamptrout/status/426438575823941633

And check out Neil's post on the top hit: http://nsaunders.wordpress.com/2014/01/24/blatting-the-internet-the-most-frequent-gene/