Search suggestions: a window on the soul of the net

Friday, February 13th, 2009

You know the little search box in the top-right of the Firefox window? Then you doubtless know that as you type search terms into it, Firefox brings up suggestions as to what it thinks you might be looking for.

You’ve probably never given this feature much thought. I hadn’t, until yesterday when I was searching for some obscure technical fact and (perhaps because we’d just been talking about natural language recognition on this week’s podcast) I absent-mindedly started to phrase my search query as a question. I didn’t get far in – just one word in, in fact – before realising this was unnecessary.

But that one word was enough to give Firefox an idea as to what I might be searching for: immediately it brought up the impressively varied suggestions you see above. (more…)