I just came across Woogle, which takes entered phrases and turns some or all of the words into pictures from Google searches. Basically, it’s a sort of rebus machine, especially if you play around with the spelling. Remember that the rebus principle is behind the creation of the Chinese-character writing system.

Here’s the result of one phrase I typed in:

(OK, it’s not a rebus. But those are a little harder to get to work.)

Woogle has a companion site named Toogle, which searches for the photo in Google that corresponds to an entered phrase and renders that photo in ascii art using the letters of the phrase itself.

Here, for example, is my poor-man’s Xu Bing of the phrase “Chinese characters”: