Fresh from the Google Labs – Google Suggest. Try it out – as you type your search Google will suggest keywords in realtime – presumably driven by most popular searches. What I really like about this is that sometimes you have to think hard for a secondary or tertiary keyword and you benefit by seeing what others have used. For example today I needed to do some research on response.redirect – using Google Suggest after I hit the space after redirect I saw exactly what I knew I was looking for – and after using that search term I was right.
I thought it would be interesting to take a snapshot of what Google Suggests for single character searches, along with the Feeling Lucky hit:
|a|amazon
|b|best buy
|c|cnn
|d|dictionary
|e|ebay
|f|firefox
|g|games
|h|hotmail
|i|ikea
|j|jokes
|k|kazaa
|l|lyrics
|m|mapquest
|n|news
|o|online dictionary
|p|paris hilton
|q|quotes
|r|recipes
|s|spybot
|t|tara reid
|u|ups
|v|verizon
|w|weather
|x|xbox
|y|yahoo
|z|zip codes
|0|02
|1|1
|2|2004 election
|3|3m
|4|411
|5|50 cent
|6|60 minutes
|7|7th heaven
|8|89.com
|9|911
A few things I found interesting in this list:
* Microsoft didn’t have m nor the top search for the x hit – xbox
* cnn made the list 3 times
* mozilla.org dictionary.com and yahoo made it twice each.
I’ll try to remember to go through it again next year (when it will no doubt still be in beta).
[UPDATE] – The Google Alphabet automates this so I won’t need to do by hand next year. Maybe they can add the code to pull the Feeling Lucky hit as well as I think that’s an interesting addition I haven’t seen with anyone else who has gone through this list. Yes, I wasn’t the only geek to do it.
[2008 UPDATE] – Seeing this post: The Google Alphabet, 2008 edition reminded me that I had also done this exercise back in 2004 (a few days earlier than the one he linked to, hah!). The automated tool I refer to in the first update above is no longer available, alas. Looking through Brady’s list, 7 of the above were still on for 2008. Of the numbers, which he doesn’t show, only 02. 4 and 50 cent still make the cut.
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{ 3 comments }
You forgot ‘.’. The top result is ‘.com’, which points to http://www.yahoo.com/.
Nice list, and to think I was about to go try all those myself.
Oh, dude, this new service of Google is so incredibly advertising-prone! Companies could easily try to get more hits by paying Google to show up earlier in the suggestions…
Also, I can’t see the logic in it. Try ‘MSX’ for example, the home computer system has like 1.5 million results, yet ‘msxml’ appears higher in the list, with not even a third of that amount. Perhaps it’s already ‘sponsored’. Or I guess more likely is that it works based on the amount of searches done by users (which is different from the number of result pages, of course).
But, I have to say, it works pretty smoothly. Interesting show of Javascript technology.
~Grauw
FYI, there’s “I’m Feeling Lucky” data from the past 2 years here: http://www.gerv.net/writings/who-owns-the-alphabet/ .
Gerv
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