Snap Does Suggest One Better

Thoughts on the intersection of search, media, technology, and more.

April 18, 2005

By John Battelle

While I was away I got a note from Bill Gross, founder of Snap (and Overture, and Picasa, and...anyway). He was brimming with the news of a neat new hack on his home page - a suggest feature that offers searches based on the letters you type in. Sounds like Google Suggest, no? NO! Gross told me. In his words:

Google suggest is awesome, but doesn�t do substrings, just the leading characters of the search term, I believe. Also, Google shows you hit count in the index, not number of searches performed by users. Number of searches by users seems to yield useful results from the �network� of people in a collaborative filtering kind of way. Just try typing in, say PASADENA, or SOLAR ENERGY, or anything, and watch what a relevant list you get because it’s using the collective knowledge of the whole network!

Comments

Bill says:
# April 18, 2005 10:21 PM

I'm not sure that Google Suggest is sorting its results by number of hits. I think it's just giving you that information as an additional tidbit.

A case in point: I did a google suggest search for 'salad', and the recommendation was 'salad fingers'. Salad fingers has 550,000 results, whereas 'salad appetizers' has 974,000, which was not recommended. So, there's clearly some metric at work here that's not just number of Google results.

k-ro says:
# April 22, 2005 9:49 AM

Note: google suggest does support substrings.

It's fun to see how many characters of your name you have to type before your name is the suggested search :)

k-ro says:
# April 22, 2005 9:52 AM

Oh wait; I misunderstood (I shoulda gone to the site first...)

Yes the substring is very cool. A basic example is typing 'depot' and the top entry is, appropriately, 'Home Depot', whereas google suggest's is 'depot prevera' until you get to the last char, when it becomes 'depot'.