Google Suggest 655
Cristiano writes "As you type into the search box, Google Suggest guesses what you're typing and offers suggestions in real time. This is similar to Google's 'Did you mean?' feature that offers alternative spellings for your query after you search, except that it works in real time." It crashes Konqueror, but works nicely on Mozilla. Update: 12/11 by J : The engineer who thought of it, then built it in his "20% time," blogs about the process.
Cool! Just like form AutoComplete (Score:5, Insightful)
Wonder how it'll hold up when it gets out Beta though...it's bound to be pretty computationally intensive.
Advertising potential (Score:3, Insightful)
Privacy? (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't mind Google knowing what I ask, but I'm not sure I want the world to see them.
What Google needs is Lexis-Nexis and Journal tabs (Score:4, Insightful)
Cool, but dangerous to google (Score:1, Insightful)
Much as I love this, I really do, I think Google is screwing themselfs over big time with this if it were to go live. Think about it, who has the most use for up-to-date common searches? Link farmers [wikipedia.org], google`s biggest problem!
All they have to do is, search for 'a', create links with the sugestions as text, search for 'b'... etc. Voila, a link farm optimized for the favourite searches of all google users. This can be automated to stay up-to-date. Much faster, more extensive and more acurate the googles zeitgeist.
I really hope googlecan make this it work though... its more helptfull the eclipse and zsh completion together ;-). Its also quite revealing of how much my searches are like everybody elses, or rather, arent alike at all.
Re:Cool! Just like form AutoComplete (Score:3, Insightful)
Not always. Big-Oh only means the worst case. Quicksort is O(n^2), but the worst case is so rare that it usually performs better than many O(n log n) algorithms.
Re:The ABCs of Google Complete (Score:4, Insightful)
Google is ranking these suggestions so that the ones you're most likely to search for are higher. So even though 's' has more hits than 'spybot', Google thinks you're more likely to search for 'spybot'. That makes sense - the terms people search for most often are not necessarily the pages with the most search results (or the highest Pagerank).
What is n? (Score:3, Insightful)
I would really like to know where you came across this. Can point us to a discription of the algorithm?
Re:Cool! Just like form AutoComplete (Score:3, Insightful)
I'd guess that n will vary between now and when they release as they grow their database.
Interestingly, they seem to clamp down on search phrases that are synonyms and start with the same beginning. For instance, the search for "Rocky Horror" is more common than "Rocky Horror Picture Show", but only the latter is listed. In this case, for reasons that are specific to the search, using RHPS over Rocky Horror can cause problems as it eliminates "Rocky Horror Show", which is the stage production, and often swapped by the public for RHPS.
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Evan
Re:Cool! Just like form AutoComplete (Score:2, Insightful)
However, it is not trivially obvious what "n" is counting is this case. For instance, I can give you an O(1) algorithm for a search of an arbitrarily large database, as long as I'm measuring complexity by w.r.t. "the number of servers used in processing the query." Adding servers will not increase the processing time, therefore there is a constant upper bound (with respect to the number of servers being used), therefore it is a constant time (or less) algorithm.
This is a stupid and intentionally misleading example, but it should show that O(f(n)) can be an utter lie if you don't know what n is. Oranges? Turtles? Pigeons? WTF?
Re:Google starts to suck (Score:3, Insightful)
They sure are starting to suck.
Re:Cool! Just like form AutoComplete (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm no Luddite, but might it not be significantly more exact to add the qualification "that can be found on the Internet"?
There's about 3 billion women in the world... (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Obfuscated Javascript (Score:3, Insightful)