SnapsuggestWhile 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!