Ask’s Search Suggest is Hilarious
If you go to Ask.com and start typing, it will try to help you find what you’re looking for by displaying a list of suggestions it thinks are relevant to your query (and give the arrogance of Ask’s marketing department, probably your life as well).
But not every suggestion is a hit; most are ok, reasonable extensions, but in nearly every phrase I type in there is something hilarious. Take, for example, “learn to speak” which has the usual suspects Spanish, English, Italian, German, and the most unusual Gibberish:
If you ask me, it’s the most expressive language in the world
While most people want to learn to play a guitar, freestyle, or draw, little Johnny is learning to levitate objects:
With his mind, what else?
Americans love to sue you. They’ll do it for wrongful imprisonment, slander, or just about any kind of distress they can of, including tubal ligation failure:
I’d rather check her phone logs…
Ask’ers don’t know much about themselves, so naturally they don’t know if they are pregnant or not, as seen in this query for “how can i:”
Also, your dog is expecting!
A typo on “how do i find” led me to this gem of feng shui confusion:
Since when is this a verb?
I saved the best for last, which is the auto-complete results for “is it legal to,” a horrifying look into modern culture:
The answer is a categorical NO!
There’s an indication that this data is filtered–try starting lesbian, for example–so I’m not sure if I believe these results. My operating assumption is that this is a marketing gimmick to try and get some churn on the blogosphere and free PR. It wouldn’t be hard to drop in a single unlikely phrase to spice things up, now would it?
p.s., don’t type “how should I” or “can I sell my” or “ask me about” because they’re sophomoric. I bet Google’s users are equally idiotic, but they certainly don’t go out of their way to show that to us!
This entry was posted on Friday, November 2nd, 2007 at 6:45 pm and is tagged with wrongful imprisonment, phone logs, free pr, expressive language, marketing department, tubal ligation, modern culture, google, italian german, gibberish, english italian, gimmick, slander, spanish english, arrogance, feng shui, blogosphere, freestyle, typo, assumption. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback.
on November 3rd, 2007 at 7:53 pm
[…] During my evening ramble down the overgrown alleyway of what we call the information superhighway, I stumbled across Elliott Backs commentary on the ridiculousness of some of the suggestions on Ask.com. […]
on November 5th, 2007 at 10:22 pm
Haha, this post really cracked me up. It’s really interesting to discover such wacky things people search up! I never knew that Ask had this feature - perhaps I need to start using Ask myself (nah, my embarrassing searches will be posted too).
Would you be interested in a link exchange? If you are, please feel free reply through an e-mail and we can arrange something!
on November 8th, 2007 at 12:47 pm
Maybe i should fung shui my room too , to get Google spider near my site
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on November 16th, 2007 at 3:43 pm
LOL, Elliott, this is probably the funniest SE related post I’ve ever read. Actually Google’s suggest has its funny parts too, but Ask beats them by far. Yet Aks.com shows improvements in comparison to google. It goes more to the natural search - gives more “hakia-type” suggestions. Interesting.