Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

What people want (according to Google Suggest)

lkozma.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 68 posts

Re: What people want (according to Google Suggest)

#51

Post by lkozma »

DotSauce wrote: post #39

These terms are ranked by # of results, not search frequency! Nothing can be gleamed except the total popularity of the individual words and phrases as they are published on the web. http://www.google.com/search?q=how+can+i+be+on+made About 25,280,000,000 results http://www.google.com/search?q=how+can+i+make+a+site About 2,210,000,000 results Both match up with the suggest data. The words at the top of the list are g…

You are absolutely right.

What confused me was this paragraph from the Google Suggest page:

" Google Suggest returns search queries based on other users' search activities. These searches are algorithmically determined based on a number of purely objective factors (including popularity of search terms) without human intervention. All of the queries shown in Suggest have been typed previously by other Google users. "

I put a correction on the page, please let me know if you wouldn't want your name to appear there.

However, I disagree that nothing can be learned from the data, because all these are real queries that have been issued multiple times. At the same time, I admit that the ordering is totally different from what I understood it to be.

It seems that when you use Google Suggest, the 10 suggestions are ordered differently than this number (the # of results) would indicate, perhaps that is the true popularity of a query, however, those partial orderings are insufficient to reconstruct the full ranked list of all queries.

Thanks again for pointing out the (major) error in the article.

Re: What people want (according to Google Suggest)

#52

Post by lkozma »

DotSauce wrote: post #39

These terms are ranked by # of results, not search frequency! Nothing can be gleamed except the total popularity of the individual words and phrases as they are published on the web. http://www.google.com/search?q=how+can+i+be+on+made About 25,280,000,000 results http://www.google.com/search?q=how+can+i+make+a+site About 2,210,000,000 results Both match up with the suggest data. The words at the top of the list are g…

I added the following correction to the article:

CORRECTION: as pointed out by users Adrian and Bones in the comments below and by Mark Fulton and apollo on the HN thread, I made an error in interpreting the data. The numbers given by Google for each query are not telling how frequently a query was asked, but rather, it seems, they are related to the popularity of the words and combinations of words (from the query) in a large corpus of website data. This way they are still related to how popular these words and groups of words are, however, not as queries, but as the text of websites. According to the Google Suggest help page, the suggested queries are all real queries, i.e. they have been issued in this exact form by someone, which in my opinion still makes the list below an interesting read, however my interpretation of the order as pure query frequency was wrong. I thank everyone for the feedback, and apologize for the misunderstanding. I leave the text below unedited, but consider this correction as you continue.

Re: What people want (according to Google Suggest)

#53

Post by IgorPartola »

gurtwo wrote: post #19
IgorPartola wrote: post #2

16 how can i search in google 2690000000 This one is just curious.

Probably meaning 'how can I better search in Google'. Can the users be trained into making better, more specific queries? At school, maybe?

Believe it or not I learned some tricks I use daily with Google from an otherwise computer illiterate English teacher in high school: using quotes and - to modify how the search works.

Re: What people want (according to Google Suggest)

#54

Post by lkozma »

apollo wrote: post #43

At first I thought the numbers were number of searches, but they're not. For example, according to AdWords, "how can i be on made" is searched less than 10 times a month globally. The numbers shown are number of results.

You are absolutely right, I added a correction. What confused me, was the wording on the Google Suggest help page and the num_queries parameter name, as rbrcurtis mentioned. Please see my replies to this: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1511824

Re: What people want (according to Google Suggest)

#55

Post by aasarava »

euroclydon wrote: post #49
dean wrote: post #44

This is a little scary ... Here are the current Google Suggest phrases on Google Canada for 'how can I': how can i kill my baby how can i make my breasts bigger how can i lose weight fast how can i lose 10 pounds in a week how can i watch hulu in canada how can i get my boyfriend hard how can i get pregnant how can i keep from singing lyrics how can i download youtube videos how can i tell if i am pregnant I often us…

If the Canucks are smart, that "how can I kill my baby?" search term is a honey pot.

Alternative explanation: The search is performed by new parents looking for tips on what NOT to do when caring for their baby.

Re: What people want (according to Google Suggest)

#56

Post by bad_user »

awolf wrote: post #22

>People who search in "how can i ..." type of questions are probably not a representative sample of the whole population. My guess is that they are less tech-savvy users on average. Hmm... I dunno. I search this way all the time. Mainly because I assume a lot of other people do as well and, more importantly, it works. Am I the only one?

Tech-savvy people know that Google eliminates stop-words and uses stemming anyhow, although their algorithms for doing that aren't public, so ...

    lose weight
... is a lot more efficient to write than ...

    how can I lose weight
And while not yielding the same results, I think the first yields better results (in this case).

Then you start adding words for refinement ...

    lose weight safe
See a pattern? ... It's a lot like adding tags, instead of formulating real phrases.

Re: What people want (according to Google Suggest)

#57

Post by maukdaddy »

dean wrote: post #44

This is a little scary ... Here are the current Google Suggest phrases on Google Canada for 'how can I': how can i kill my baby how can i make my breasts bigger how can i lose weight fast how can i lose 10 pounds in a week how can i watch hulu in canada how can i get my boyfriend hard how can i get pregnant how can i keep from singing lyrics how can i download youtube videos how can i tell if i am pregnant I often us…

Odd that killing the baby is first on the list, yet further down there are at least 4 other suggestions directly or indirectly leading to having that baby.

Re: What people want (according to Google Suggest)

#58

Post by scottyallen »

This is a really clever way to look for business ideas. I've tried doing something similar with twitter, searching for phrases like "I'm looking to buy" and "I wish there was". There's a lot of noise though, and the publicly searchable data set is way too small. This seems like a much better data set. If you pair this with trends or some of the ads traffic data, you could probably figure out what sort of search volume these searches are getting.

Seems like there's a real opportunity to take the tactics that Demand Media uses to generate ideas for articles/videos and apply it more broadly to products (see http://www.wired.com/magazine/2009/10/ff_demandmedia/ for a good article about Demand Media's approach). Instead of trying to generate ideas on what products people might like and test if they actually do (using an MVP or dry testing), instead figure out what they're looking for that they're not finding, and offer that.

Re: What people want (according to Google Suggest)

#59

Post by dkarl »

igravious wrote: post #9
IgorPartola wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if at least some of the time #55 refers more to getting him back mentally, as in back to the state before puberty hit. #46 is indeed very sad.

No, it's in all likelihood the the parent-son bond has been broken and the parent would like to fix that. They are both very sad, and no reference to daughters in the list? Sons may stray further or abandon their parents more than daughters.

I too was struck by the absence of "daughter." I like your explanation better than my knee-jerk assumption that people care more about sons than daughters.

Re: What people want (according to Google Suggest)

#60

Post by zaphar »

aasarava wrote: post #55
euroclydon wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the Canucks are smart, that "how can I kill my baby?" search term is a honey pot.

Alternative explanation: The search is performed by new parents looking for tips on what NOT to do when caring for their baby.

Another alternative explanation: Pregnant women/teens who don't want to carry the baby to term.
Post reply on HN