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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."

5 of 148 comments (clear)

  1. when will they get it? by Quasar1999 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    It's not the amount of data that a program references to create a result, it's the precision of it's result that matters... if it can do it with relatively little data, then it was designed/implemented by someone who knows what they're doing...

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    Programming is like sex... Make one mistake and support it the rest of your life.
  2. we're not all one big group by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Google needs to remember the last x queries that we submitted and the time we submitted them to better guess what we're looking for. If I hit 'p' I get Paris Hilton even though previous searches were for perl, parrot and pascal.

    When will they work out that there are different classes of users out there that look for different things at different times?

  3. Weird thing about Google Suggest... by tommertron · · Score: 4, Insightful

    ... it doesn't include dirty words. I know, I may be a little immature, but it's almost always the first thing I try on anything like this. There's not even a way of turning 'safe suggest' on or off or anything. Even such innocuous (and popular!) words like 'nude' aren't suggested. What if you're searching for nude models for your art class, or the great nudes? It's just interesting... Google is becoming very corporate in terms of filtering out content these days.

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    Random rants about technology: http://technorants.blogspot.com
    1. Re:Weird thing about Google Suggest... by tommertron · · Score: 3, Insightful
      Its in beta. When they release it, you can complain then. Maybe they haven't integrated into the Safe Suggest yet. Did I mention its in beta, and not done yet?

      Why is there always a comment like this? Yes, it's in Beta, but isn't the point of Beta to discuss the product's flaws, or criticisms about it? And then maybe when it's 'done' we won't have to 'complain' as much. And whoever said it was even a criticism? Just an observation to provoke discussion.

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      Random rants about technology: http://technorants.blogspot.com
  4. Who searches for these things?? by stevejsmith · · Score: 3, Insightful

    a: amazon
    b: best buy
    c: cnn

    WHO THE FUCK SEARCHES FOR THOSE THINGS?? It amazes me how stupid people are - rather than type in amazon.com, bestbuy.com, or cnn.com, they actually search for them on Google.