Sites like Google and Bing are showing the precise questions that
are most frequently asked, giving everyone a chance to peer
virtually over everyone else's shoulders.
There are the questions you ask friends, family members and close
confidants. And then there are the questions you ask the Internet.
Search engines have long provided clues to the topics people look
up. But now, sites like Google and Bing are showing the precise
questions that are most frequently asked, giving everyone a chance
to peer virtually over everyone else's shoulders at what they are
all curious about.
And the sites are revealing interesting patterns.
Frequently asked questions include: When will the world end? Was
Neil Armstrong Muslim? Was George Washington gay?
The questions come from a feature that Google calls
"autocomplete" and Microsoft calls "autosuggest." These anticipate
what you are likely to ask, based on questions that other people
have asked. Simply type a question starting with a word like "is" or
"was," and search engines will start filling in the rest.
People who study online behavior also say the autocomplete
feature reveals broader patterns, including indications that the
questions people ask of search engines often veer into the sensitive
and politically incorrect.
"Your search engine is your best friend, and you talk to it about
everything, even things you might not talk about to your real best
friends," said Danny Sullivan, editor in chief of Search Engine
Land, a Web site that covers the search industry. "It's a way that
search engines reflect society."
One category of question comes up with puzzling frequency in
autocomplete: whether a certain person is gay.
Is the singer Elton John gay? Is the U.S. politician Paul Ryan
gay? Is the mayor of New York, Michael R. Bloomberg, gay? The
question pops up often, too, when starting searches about the actor
George Clooney, the New York Yankees third baseman Alex Rodriguez,
Genghis Khan, several cartoon characters and even the pope.
This line of questioning is so commonplace that a simple query on
Google beginning with "is" can result in autocomplete predicting
that you are about to ask, Is Frank Ocean gay? Do the same with
Bing, Microsoft's search engine, and it often fills out the
question, Is Robin Roberts gay? Though these questions do not pop up
every time, they do appear with surprising frequency.
Nick In't Ven, senior program manager at Microsoft's Bing search
engine, said that the returns reflected the collective curiosities
of its users (and that similar results turn up on Google). He could
not say how many times people have to type in a question for it to
dominate the feature but said that for popular single terms, like
"Facebook," it is well into the millions.
Search engine experts said they could not rule out the
possibility that the phenomenon is the result of some bug in the
system, but they added that it seemed very unlikely.
"We base it on experience, what users have asked about around the
world," Mr. In't Ven said. "We're trying to reflect the world's
collective intentions." If people wonder whether other people are
gay, "that is the collective intention, and we abide with it."
Mr. In't Ven added that he and his colleagues at Microsoft have
often discussed some of the strange questions. A few months ago,
