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Google Suggest Dissected, Part II

Posted by michael on from the kudos-for-correct-use-of-complement dept.

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."

2 of 148 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Who searches for these things?? by kentmartin · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.

  2. Nielson Usability by lxt · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.