More Google Suggestion analysis

My What is Twitter piece last week was interesting enough to spur more research. Google Suggestions are quite interesting and is great way to take the internet’s pulse.

Most one-letter suggestions (A, B, C, etc) are for specific companies or services. A = Amazon, B = Best Buy, C = craigslist, G = Gmail. A decent number of these–J = JC Penny, K = Kohls, L = Lowes–are not large online brands, which is surprising.

I’ve known for a while that a lot of people use Google as sort of a universal address bar. They type in a web address and hit search and then hit the top result. I’m not sure why this is so popular, but a certain percentage of people seem to not know you can type in your own address. This is especially popular with real estate searchers apparently, the top suggestion for R is “realtor.com”. Zillow’s audience is somewhat savvier and decides to just search for Zillow.

The most striking example is one of the suggestions for W is “www.yahoo.com”. Think about that.

Some other results that surprised me include (these were all found by searching the first letter and looking at suggestions):

• “edible arrangements”
• “utube”
• “poptropica”
• “addicting games”
• “kawasaki disease”
• “lyrics.com”

Overall it seems a lot of people are searching for things that don’t need to be searched for. Curious.