Yesterday Dana was using my iBook and needed to search for something, so she started typing in Firefox’s quick search bar. Then she says to me “So, been looking for college girls, eh?” (She asked it jokingly. I think.) Which surprised me a bit, mainly because I hadn’t been searching for college girls, but also because I almost never use the quick search bar. I’ve been using Mozilla’s keyword feature for so long, I’m wired into just hitting command-L, and then ‘gg’ followed by the term I am searching for. (Notice the small grey text ‘Suggestions’ below.)
So just to make sure I wasn’t crazy, I checked it on another install of Firefox, and the same thing happened. You can also see this in action if you go to Google Suggest and type in ‘co’. At least it worked for me just now. Oh, Google does have this to say:
Google Suggest might offer suggestions that you will find novel or intriguing.
Novel or intriguing indeed. Anyway, it’s a good idea to know about this suggestive search feature the next time someone thinks your search history includes something you were not searching for. Not that there’s anything wrong with searching for whatever you’re searching for…