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Comment by pgroves | Hacker News Reader

Without typing anything in the search box, hit down arrow to get a list of suggested searches. My personalization was extremely spot on given that I haven't used Lycos in 10 years.

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I think that's just random auto-complete noise caused by the fact that their search input uses a fairly common name.

No, it was creepily relevant for me too. It seems to know what I've been typing into Github over the past 24 hours.

I don't think you understand. Try using it in incognito mode. It even works there. Try clearing your browser form history. Now it doesn't.

You're right, I completely misread the grandparent.

Would the downvoters kindly explain themselves? I intended to pose an honest question about how they're doing autocomplete. Apparently I'm the only one who hasn't seen that particular behavior on a search engine before. I don't recall that specific set of suggestions show up in any other search box I've used, probably because I don't pay attention.

Edit: I see now that I misinterpreted the parent. I thought he meant those just happened to be the top Lycos search terms, but he meant that the name of the form element was shared with other sites that have search fields I use.

That's the browser's autocomplete, probably triggered by the field being named 'q'. It tracks what you've entered into other fields (I assume named 'q'), hence I get lots of testing data from my current project's search field.

I wonder what the source is. It had access to a lot of keywords for which I searched on my company's internal code search system.

Other forms you've filled out in your browser with an <input name="q">

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