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Comment by andrenotgiant | Hacker News Reader

Using the "Why is X" Google autosuggest as proof is meaningless, no one searches for "why is gmail so great" and the same suggestions come up for all popular products and services.

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Lucky he didn't do a "why is fastmail" search :).

Haha - I just did one "why is fastmail down". Gmail has that as the #2 spot so I consider it a tie =)

Yea you're right - it's definitely a biased sample but still shows others are experiencing it to some degree.

I do the same check for "why is fastmail" and get "why is fastmail down" - I suppose slow is better than down.

It also can show that billions of gmail accounts exist and there are so many middle reasons your mail can be down, besides the actual source. I bash google all the time, but the gmail is legit so far in my book.

That, and your search results (and auto-completes) are personalized.

"It seems kind of ironic that a company whose motto is “Don’t Be Evil” has a flagship product that believes virtually every demographic group should be murdered en masse. I don’t know if this is a weird quirk of the search algorithm or if pretty much everyone who makes should-statements on the Internet is recommending genocide."

http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/04/04/lies-damned-lies-and-fa...

>or if pretty much everyone who makes should-statements on the Internet is recommending genocide

No, you are seeing a reflection of what other people are searching too. It's a mirror into peoples private naughty thoughts. Stuff they wouldn't say themselves, yet they search for to see if there are arguments supporting the thought.

I've always wondered - are Google's autocomplete choices based on what people are searching for, or are they based on frequently-found phrases in website content?

I'm pretty sure it's based on the most commonly searched phrases with phrases containing words on a blacklist deleted. Add in some magic to throw off the spammers and competition.

>are Google's autocomplete choices based on what people are searching for

Yes. Much more useful that way. They want to auto-suggest what is the most likely search, not what is the most likely content.

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