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March 7, 2010

Exploring Google Suggest

What Do You Suggest? is a site that lets you visually explore how Google Suggest autocompletes a query. "What Do You Suggest takes a seed from you, then guides you on a journey through language and the collective lives of Google users."



Simon Elvery, who created the site, found a lot of interesting patterns:
There are some recurring themes which have emerged as I've been playing with the site during its creation. Among other things, it seems people do rather a lot of searching on the topics of music, religion and relationships.

Sometimes the results are sad, like the people searching for free ebooks on relationships for dummies, and sometimes hopeful like looking for love.

Health is also a recurring theme with the names of medicines, diseases and symptoms appearing over and over again.

{ via Information Aesthetics }

15 comments:

  1. :D just awesome although i think it is only for fun as we always searching for certain sentence and we don't search by coincidence but it stills too fun

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  2. I've always wondered how Google Suggest (and the others that copy Google) works.
    - David

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  3. Google suggest is polluting the world. Turn it off!

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  4. awesome although i think it is only for fun

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  5. i will be using this for more than fun - it's a very good tool for SEO

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  6. Digging through google suggest, i fall in front of paying API when come to me the idea to make this with the "keyword generator", like the one in Google adword here : https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal
    When i think to the drawing for path to search, it's more by the meaning than by the sentence....
    Can "open" developpers play with words and synonymes empored by people's relationals clics ?
    Otherway, great scripting exercice this "Flowing Sentence Suggest data" with canvas and RaphaelJS :)

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  7. I have made a little test that might lead me to think the order of the suggst listing is correlated to the global exact match search volume.

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  8. You know Yahoo! used this technology first and still does a better job, right?

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  9. It's not that important who added this feature first, but the first search engine who tested an autocomplete feature was Google. In fact, Google Suggest was one of the first web applications that used Ajax. Yahoo added autocomplete as a standard feature before Google, but Google Suggest was already available as a Firefox extension and as an experimental service.

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  10. Try entering "why do black" and see the suggestions. What's that about Google?

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  11. Never mind. Wrong interface. Just go to Google home page and enter "why do black" and see the suggestions. Bizarre.

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  12. That's what people search using Google. You'll find a lot of stereotypes, urban legends and naive questions.

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  13. Superb tool!! I was looking for something like this for a long time!

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  14. This is really useful, I'm really keen on the Google suggest not just for fun but for long tail keywords and blog suggestions

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  15. awesome although i think it is only for fun

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