You have used Google Suggest, whether or not you realize it. It's that neat (and sometimes depressing) feature on Google sites that offers popular completions to what you're typing, as you type it.
I thought it would be interesting to see what Google suggests as the top heading for each letter of the alphabet.
So here it is, the popular Google suggest searches, as of a Monday night in August:
a = amazon
b = best buy
c = craigslist
d = dictionary
e = ebay
f = facebook
g = gmail
h = hotmail
i = ikea
j = java
k = kgw
l = lowes
m = myspace
n = netflix
o = oregon dmv
p = pandora
q = quotes
r = rei
s = sears
t = target
u = usps
v = verizon
w = weather
x = xbox (i would like to note here that xkcd was second place)
y = youtube
z = zillow
For a few letters, the calculator result was the first one, but I chose to ignore that. Not a lot of surprises. I'd never heard of zillow, but then I've never been interested in buying a home either, so that fits.
I wondered about Oregon dmv coming up for the first hit for "o". I tried clearing out all of the caches in my browser and signing out of google and using an incognito browser, and then a different browser, but I got the same result.
It made me wonder if someone querying google.com from a non oregon ip address would get the same results?
I messaged a friend in Utah, and had her type an "o" into a google.com search field. Her first result was: orbitz.
Not a very controlled experiment, so I'll try again, but this does lead me to think that different IPs talking to google suggest may return different results.
Being an end user is mysterious!
