The Dark Depths of Google
December 13 2009 — JA
Many intrepid googlers will probably be familiar with the ‘autocomplete’ function on the home page. For those of you who aren’t, it’s the handy little tool that tries to help complete your search before you’ve finished typing (or sometimes, spookily, before you even know what you’re looking for).
The Millions have this to say:
Although it’s not entirely clear how Google generates suggestions, they are at least in part based on searches entered by other users. The more popular a search, the more likely it is to appear at the top of the list of suggestions. At first, this might seem like an innocuous feature, but on closer inspection, it turns out to be a powerful tool for peering into the murky depths of the collective unconscious.
The creators of Autocomplete Me have cottoned on early to this murky unconscious – they’ve come up with a site that lists the more bizarre suggestions in Google’s vast, emotionless, glugging brain. The results, are at turns, both innocent/sad (‘how to … kiss’, ‘how come … when I talk to girls on facebook they don’t answer me back’), stupid (‘how come a cupcake is … not considered a mineral?’), ridiculous (‘it’s weird that… chairs even exist when you’re not sitting on them’) and disturbing (‘how to raise your iq by eating gifted children’).
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