Google Suggest: Searching Search

Google Suggest

Google Suggest provides really interesting results when you type in "why do" or "why is" and then drill down to very specific questions. It's fantastic that people enter questions into Google, because this answers the question, "has anyone already asked this?" And indeed, people ask really odd questions, I'm sure. Whether Google enters the really obscure ones in, I'm not sure.

Google can determine which are the most common questions based on the result count, but this is not the only criteria. Some suggestions come up that are less common than others that don't intially come up until you refine it further. For example, if you type "why is", a variety of suggestions come up, many of them less common than the variety of "why is the" suggestions. So the algorithm prevents the slew of suggestions that lie at a lower level of detail from skewing the results at the higher, more general level.

Google Suggest is a meta-search, mining the vast amounts of search query data that Google has collected over the years. Google could and likely is now looking at how mining Google Suggest data could be used. Google Suggest Suggest, perhaps? Google Suggest Trends? Google Trends Suggest? The beauty of Google's business is that is infinitely expandable, and their business feeds itself what it needs more than anything, except for maybe cash: Information.

It is doubtful that Google refreshes the Google Suggest suggestions too often, but it would be great if it was. If it were based on live data (and this goes for Google Trends as well) the results would be vastly more valuable. If something happens in the world to cause a spike in a particular term, it would be useful to suggest to people what other people are looking for, now.