Google Suggests Goooooooooooooooogle
Commenter kzinti at Slashdot discovered what happens if you use Google Suggest and type "G", followed by "o", followed by "o", followed by "o", followed by "o", followed by "o", followed by "o", followed by "o",... Of course, Google Suggest keeps suggesting an obscene amount of "o"s, never quite satisfied with how many you enter, further exascerbating the Goooooooooooooooooooogle oddity I mentioned in September. Also, one poster, loconet, dug up the code Google uses to power Suggest. Every time you type a letter, Google "a special modified version of the search tool which only returns the necessary javascript data". You can see that modified Google page by going to http://www.google.com/complete/search?hl=en&js=true&qu=QUERY (replacing QUERY) with whatever letters you've typed in. Sample code (for a request for "slash"):

sendRPCDone(frameElement, "slash", new Array("slashdot", "slash", "slashdot.org", "slash dot", "slash fiction", "slashdot rss", "slash and burn", "slashdot.com", "slash fanfiction", "slashdotorg"), new Array("8,960,000 results", "2,770,000 results", "1 result", "389,000 results", "802,000 results", "2,540,000 results", "470,000 results", "1 result", "132,000 results", "966 results"), new Array(""));

Cool stuff. Someone should devise a page that requests that data and uses it in some other, inventive way. I'm sure something can be done with it.

Also, we finally have an ABCs of Google. Poster Hatta lists the first result for each letter:

A is for Amazon
B is for Best Buy
C is for CNN
D is for Dictionary
E is for Ebay
F is for Firefox (yay!)
G is for Games
H is for Hotmail
I is for Ikea
J is for Jokes
K is for Kazaa
L is for Lyrics
M is for Mapquest
N is for News
O is for Online dictionary
P is for Paris Hilton (wtf?!)
Q is for Quotes
R is for Recipes
S is for Spybot
T is for Tara Reid
U is for Ups
V is for Verizon
W is for Weather
X is for Xbox
Y is for Yahoo
Z is for Zip Codes

Gotta love the WTF he put by Paris Hilton. Guaranteed that P and K won't last forever. Dissapointing, though, that I'll have to beat "News" if I ever want to be the number one N.

Postscript: Google Suggest makes for a decent spellchecker, allowing me to spell "exascerbating" properly.
- posted by Nathan Weinberg @ 12/10/2004 02:17:00 PM