Google Suggest Hacking
Alright, this is pretty darn cool: “Google Suggest: As you type, Google will offer suggestions.”
This got me to thinking: what happens when you type in nonsense words? Specifically, what’s the shortest “word” which gives zero suggestions? After a bit of searching, I found a three letter nonsense word: “zcj”. About five minutes later, I found another three letter word: “sex”, which probably has the distinction of being the shortest real word in the english language blocked by Google Suggest.
I tried to find two letter words that didn’t have any suggestions, but couldn’t come up with any. Let me know if you find some.
If you just can’t get enough Google Suggest Hacking, there’s already a lot of it going on out there:
- Dave Pell has compiled a list of Google suggestions for each letter of the alphabet: m: mapquest, n: news, o: online dictionary, p: paris hilton, etc.
- Pakter, in the Joel On Software web forums says to try typing things like “where do”, “what is our”, “when do”, “where is”, “why am I” and “was Jesus”. (The original thread was on the ethics of G.S. itself: you can see possibly defamatory information about someone. For instance, if you type in “Tom Cruise”, one of the suggestions is “tom cruise gay”. [Oh no! -- ed.])
- Adam Stiles has already worked up some code that will fetch the results from Google Suggest for a given query, and then automatically grab and summarize all of the related queries.