Google Knows What You’re Thinking… They Think
The latest step in Google’s never-ending quest to make finding things on the Internet easier and the results more accurate, is called Google Suggest. Start typing your search and as you type, Google Suggest guesses what you’re typing and offers suggestions in real time.
Wow, you say, How do they do that? Well, according to Google Suggest’s FAQ, “Google Suggest uses data about the overall popularity of various searches to help rank the refinements it offers”.
Unfortunately, the majority of Google users are idiots, so the suggestions Google Suggest offers are far from useful in many cases. For example, here’s a screen shot of the results I got as I started typing, ‘where is…’.
How useful do these results seem, and just what would someone be looking for that would lead them to believe they could find ‘it’ on Google by asking, ‘Where is it’? Of course, with 1.5 billion results, the answer might actually be there somewhere.
Where is my refund? Perhaps a better place to ask that question would be your employer or the IRS?
Where is Dubai? Of all the places in the world that someone might be interested to know the location of, Dubai is the most popular?
Where is .com? I have only one thing to say. D’oh!
Where is my mind? This is actually an excellent question, but hardly one I would expect to find the answer to on Google.
Do we really need Google anticipating what we’re about to type? When you launch Google and start typing in ‘where is…’, don’t you already know what the next words are going to be? Does it save you any time to stop typing, grab your mouse and point to a suggestion in a list, instead of just finishing typing ‘Elmo’?
Posted: May 5th, 2007 under Commentary.
Comments: 4
Comments
Comment from Owned
Time: May 6, 2007, 7:49 am
Only a moron would type a full question into Google anyway lol.
Comment from BOSSY
Time: May 7, 2007, 9:26 am
Where is the end to this absurdity?
Comment from Wayne Smallman
Time: May 7, 2007, 1:42 pm
I spotted Google Suggest a while ago while looking for a good keyword tool.
But, as is nearly always the case with stuff like this, almost everything I threw at the damn thing yielded really, really poor results.
So I went back to the Yahoo! / Overture thing instead…
Comment from Flametree
Time: May 12, 2007, 10:50 pm
I couldn’t survive without where is.com - seriously, I use it for planning all my trips around Sydney and beyond.
http://www.whereis.com - it’s a god-send for people without GPS… though I doubt it would be helpful for those trying to find the easter bunny unless they have his address….
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