One More Thing...
Fun With Google
by Ken Graham
T
he best things in life are free, my parents kept telling me. But I didn’t believe them for a second. Like most red-blooded Americans, I spent my youth trying to come up with the money to buy better stuff, whether it was a bigger and better train set or a bicycle with more gears. (Having a ten-speed isn’t so great after your best friend gets a sixteen-speed.)
But while nothing in life is truly free, I began to appreciate that there were things – like a hike in the woods or reading a good book – that were loads of fun and didn’t break the bank.
Computer games are another example. They can cost a bundle, but they don’t have to if you make up your own. Here’s my favorite:
Go to google.com and play the search suggestion game. Google has a new feature, in which it gives suggestions after you type in a few letters in its search bar. For instance, when I type in the word “Dayton”, without a space after the “n”, the following list of suggestions drops down below the bar:
Daytona 500 Results
Dayton Daily News (it’s in Ohio, I presume)
Daytona 500
Daytona Beach News Journal
Daytona Bike Week 2010
And so forth (I’m writing this column the day after the Daytona 500 NASCAR race was held, so the results may differ in a few weeks.)
Google makes these suggestions based on the frequency of recent searches made by other Google users. It’s understandable that more people are interested in learning about a major automobile race in Florida than about a small rural town in southeastern Washington.
The search suggestions get more interesting when I type in the beginning of a basic phrase or question. For instance, when I typed in “who is”, the first suggestion given was “Who is Lady Gaga?” (I swear I’m not making this up.) This was followed by “Who is my congressman?” Fifth on the list was “Who is Taylor Swift dating?”
When the words “my wife” were typed in, the first two that didn’t have to do with the television show “My Wife and Kids” were “my wife hates me” and “my wife cheated on me”. Remember, these are Google searches we’re talking about.
Number one on the “My husband” list was “my husband is annoying”, followed in order by “hates me”, “doesn’t love me”, “is a jerk”, “ignores me” and “cheated on me”. Apparently people who are happily married are a lot less interested in learning why.
Unmarried people have slightly different complaints. Number one under “My boyfriend” is the understandable complaint that he “ignores me”. And I swear it’s true that the number one complaint about girlfriends, as typed into Google, is that they “won’t shave”.
Next, I tried “why are the”. The number one suggestion was a question that is definitely puzzling: “Why are the Kardashians famous?” Number seven on the list is “Why are the Simpsons yellow?”
Songs and movies are often at the top of the search lists, so two of the first four suggestions after typing in “I am” have to do with the old Beatles song “I am the Walrus”. Number one on that list though, says something about this whole endeavor: “I am bored”.
Some of the results can be downright puzzling. The first suggestion after typing in the words “my car is”, was the phrase “my car is my lover”. It turns out that this is the title of a recent BBC documentary about men who are, literally, in love with their cars. (You can relate, can’t you ladies.)
There’s a certain bizarre logic in the fact that the second suggestion on that list, after “my car is my lover”, is the complaint: “my car is overheating”.