Re: Amazing

On Wed, Feb 07, 2007 at 11:22:55AM -0600, Scott Walde wrote:
> I have already been amazed with the google search box in FF2.0 and it's
> suggestions. I assumed they were using a list of most frequently
> searched terms. But, now I'm wondering if their algorithm is way more
> involved than that.
>
> A couple minutes ago, while John Gormley was introducing an upcoming
> guest, a professor known as Dr. Popsicle (for his research into the
> effects of cold on people), I typed "dr " into the search box, and it
> suggested 'dr popsicle'. You _can't_ tell me that 'dr popsicle' is the
> most common search term starting with 'dr '.
>
> Google must be actively updating the suggestions in realtime. Is it
> possible they're also making suggestions based on region?

I never question the engineers at google. They prove time and time again
they are way more clever than me. I don't doubt they can tie searches to a
region. They already do that for adsense, I use adwords and target at
Saskatchewan. I can't say for sure it's completely accurate but the
click throughs I get are all from Saskatchewan. There's not reason they
couldn't tie the live search into that same mechanism.

It is surprising that real-time updates would be happening in searches,
adwords keywords (which don't change in real-time) take a few minutes to
become active, I assume they are processed in batch.
Received on Wed Feb 7 11:38:52 2007