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Comment by donahue | Hacker News Reader

If you hadn't had that conversation it would not have mattered that she showed up in autocomplete. You would've thought nothing of it. It's only because you had the conversation that the name had any significance. Probably hundreds of times it autocompleted names of people from 4 years ago but since there was no corresponding conversation, you didn't take note and just looked past it.

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I believe that’s called Bader Meinhoff Phenomenon aka “Frequency Illusion”.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frequency_illusion

Oh weird, I was just reading about that.

We know.

"Plate of shrimp"

I didn't know this was the name of the phenomenon. I suspect others looking this up will come across the great movie called The Bader-Meinhoff Complex.

Actually, I would have been dumbfounded as to why it was an autocomplete solution. The letters were not an intersection for the second lady's name.

> it would not have mattered that she showed up in autocomplete

It certainly would, if you cannot figure out why a query returns an apparently fully unrelated record.

Isn't it possible that someone else messaged the Smith's about the conversation, and mentioned OP's name, and then some algorithm made the connection?

I guess the question then becomes "would that name have shown up if op hadn't said it?" And frankly it seems pretty naive to say that it's only an issue because op noticed it this time.

There are far, far too many "coincidences" from many people with this same or similar story.

Far too many based on what? Consider how many chances there are for stories like this: just about everyone owns a phone, and people share things all time.

Ads based on private conversations is my primary experience.

People talk about something, never look it up, never search for it, never try to buy it, but they see ads for it.

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