Firefox first suggestion for “f”

When I type "f" into Google Suggest, the first suggestion is "Firefox". Nice. Does that mean Firefox is the most common search starting with "f", or are there other factors that affect the ranking?

8 Responses to “Firefox first suggestion for “f””

  1. Papuass Says:

    No, it is not. Seems that Google guys have some special love to Firefox. Free games, Ford and Flowers are more popular.

  2. Milly Says:

    Other factors :-

    http://labs.google.com/suggest/faq.html#q2

    “That’s pretty cool. How does it do that?
    Our algorithms use a wide range of information to predict the queries users are most likely to want to see. For example, Google Suggest uses data about the overall popularity of various searches to help rank the refinements it offers. An example of this type of popularity information can be found in the Google Zeitgeist. Google Suggest does not base its suggestions on your personal search history.”

    I guess Firefox is hot at the moment, so heads the list despite having far fewer results than Ford or flowers. “o” finds Oprah, but it takes “op” to find Opera (and then, still behind Oprah).

    Spybot heads the “s” list, but sex isn’t there at all. iPod beats Internet Explorer in the “i” list, but both are beaten by Ikea.

    What can it all mean? ;)

    (I suppose a tiresome SEO sub-industry will flourish on this stuff … )

  3. Robert O'Callahan Says:

    > Seems that Google guys have some special love to
    > Firefox. Free games, Ford and Flowers are more
    > popular.

    Those numbers on the right are the number of hits, not the popularity.

  4. Ted Mielczarek Says:

    Holy crap, I just looked at the javascript source: http://www.google.com/ac.js

    I really hope they’re using a javascript compression program and not programming like that. :)

  5. KDS Says:

    Did you notice that when you type something and the probable phrases appear, you cannot hold down the DOWN ARROW key and scroll down. You have to scroll down one-by-one :(

    Google and their heavy Javascript. I almost get a crash on blogger.com every day!!

  6. Joost Schuur Says:

    First hit for ‘s’ is spybot and not.. well.. you’d expect ‘sex’ to be a much more common search.

    Amusing: ‘t’ is ‘Tara Reid’ and ‘r’ is ‘recipe’, ‘p’ is ‘Paris Hilton’.

    A lot of companies in there too: ebay, amazon, best buy, ups, yahoo, ikea.

  7. john Says:

    Here is the whole single char list:

    http://www.johnsjottings.com/archives/2004/12/10/google_suggests.html

  8. Kevin Says:

    It’s pretty obvious that they’ve specifically omitted “objectionable” terms from the suggestions, so of course ‘s’ isn’t going to give ‘sex’.

    I think the FAQ that someone quoted states quite explicitly that the ordering is based on popularity, though it doesn’t imply that this is the sole criteria. I don’t know why it was quoted as evidence to the contrary.