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."
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.