What the heck are we thinking? If you look closely, Google provides some depressing news about our hive mind these days, especially when it comes to California.
Slate magazine – calling Google "the new oracle at Delphi" – asked its readers to find the least intelligent query from Google Suggest, which automatically generates options as people are typing their search words. The winner:
Here is how Slate's Josh Levin describes what's going on:
Google doesn't reveal its search algorithms, but the company's engineers confirm that what we're looking at in the toolbar is, essentially, a list of the 10 most popular queries that start with a given prefix. (It's unclear what time period the suggestions are culled during, but a spokesman says they're generated from 'recent [search] activity.') A suggestion-enabled search is like an instant popularity contest. Just type in a couple of letters, and you've got access to oodles of data on what your fellow Web surfers are hunting for.
The results of a few California-related searches shows people are in a foul mood. Here's some searches from yesterday:
And this:
And this:
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