Google Suggest Dissected, Part II

Bert690 writes "To complement the recent dissection of Google Suggest's innovative front end, I investigated [Coral Link & mirror] the back end of the system in an effort to determine just how it generates suggestions. Along with some preliminary findings, you'll find a pointer to a program for enumerating all possible suggestions from a given starting point. I found the number of possible suggestions to be surprisingly small considering the immense scope of the web."

Comments

Re:Eric Rice

[Anonymous Coward]

That link doesn't work, add an underscore before the "archives"

Re:Funny

[tdvaughan]

Are you suggesting that no-one searches for 'porn' on Google? It's more likely that the results are passed through a sanitiser beforehand so that you don't have Google suggesting you look at adult content.

Re:Who searches for these things??

[daishin]

Well, you can enter in "amazon" into the firefox (and probably other browsers) address bar, hit enter and it will do a "I'm Feeling Lucky" search on google for it, I do that a lot, I'm very lazy.

Re:Who searches for these things??

[kentmartin]

One thing that may bump up the stats on these sorts of things is Firefox.

Oftentimes I just punch just enough into the address bar to hit what I want, knowing that Firefox wanders off to google and does an "I'm feeling lucky" if it cannot resolve my input. ie, ipw2200 will always take me to ipw2200.sourceforge.net.

Just a thought.

Mined Query Logs

[Anonymous Coward]

Contrary to what the author suggests, I suspect that the suggested searches are derived from query logs, not from the documents themselves.

As others have noted, the top suggestion for p is paris hilton with 6.7M results, but the number of results for the next 5 suggestions contain far more results -- more than 20M, in fact.

I doubt there is much of an attempt at precision. For example, the first suggestion for "new york" is "new york times"; the second is "new york."

Re:when will they get it?

[SunPin]

How about a Slashdot Suggest - it would score your article as you type it

No point in doing extra programming to make the system as random as it already is.

Nielson Usability

[lxt]

If I remember correctly, I remember reading in one of Jacob Nielson's usability books about how a surprisingly large majority of users thought (this was back in the day before Google) that the Yahoo search field "was the internet". They typed everything into it, and payed no attention to the adress bar.

found one use

[earthstar]

Today , finally found a use for google suggest. Lets say some weird news [ or rather a 'hushed' news ] has broken out.Then when you type only some word about it ,then you get to see, under which combination of words , maximum number of results have been obtained.

The suggested words by themselves may not be all that useful,but when combined with the number of results shown for each keyword ,I think it can be useful.

Google suggest may not be immediately be of use to everyone like Google.com,but will rather be when a particular situation arises for the user.

I think its a specific need based solution.

First Suggestions

[YowzaTheYuzzum]

First suggestion for each letter/number:

amazon
best buy
cnn
dictionary
ebay
firefox
games
hotmai l
ikea
jokes
kazaa
lyrics
mapquest
news
onl ine dictionary
paris hilton
quotes
recipes
spybot
tara reid
ups
verizon
weather
xbox
yahoo
zip codes

1
2004 election
3m
411
50 cent
60 minutes
7th heaven
89.com
911
02

Small Perl script to get suggestions

[John Bokma]

see http://johnbokma.com/perl/google-suggest.html