Hacker News Reader

Comment by DotSauce | Hacker News Reader

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 generic: (will, free, help, made, etc.)

As you go down the list, the words become less generic: (dream, market, people, speed, password, etc.)

You would be better off looking at Google AdWords data or http://google.com/trends

View on HN

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.

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com