Out of curiosity, I was looking how a browser interacts with the Google Instant
backend. While looking at the HTTP exchanges via Firebug, I first asked myself
why they’re encoding HTML and JS with \xYY escape sequences, then why the
very same JS functions are sent back and forth on every request, and later I
stumbled upon the google.com/s?q=QUERY JSONp service.
Give it a query, and it’ll return the suggested related phrases that are used to build the menu under the search input while using suggestions and/or instant (didn’t dig too much into all the other parameters).
Anyway, what’s interesting is that, of course, the suggestions are customized
on a per-country basis. To show the differences explicitly, let’s ask the
service the simplest query possible, a:
For Italy you’ll get:
$ curl http://www.google.it/s?q=a
window.google.ac.h(["a",[["ansa","","0"],
["alice","","1"],["alitalia","","2"],["alice mail","","3"],
["apple","","4"],["agenzia delle entrate","","5"],
["audi","","6"],["aci","","7"],["autoscout","","8"],
["atm","","9"]],"","","","","",{}])
hum, let’s scrap the JSONp and parameters out:
$ curl -s http://www.google.it/s?q=a | ruby -rjson -ne 'puts JSON($_[19..-2])[1].map(&:first).join(", ")'
ansa, alice, alitalia, alice mail, apple, agenzia delle entrate, audi, aci, autoscout, atm
For the US you’ll get:
amazon, aol, att, apple, american airlines, abc, ask.com, amtrak, addicting games, aim
UK:
argos, amazon, asda, asos, autotrader, aa route planner, aol, apple, amazon uk, aqa
Ireland:
aer lingus, aib, argos, amazon.co.uk, argos.ie, asos, aa route planner, amazon, aldi, aib internet banking
Lastly, because I’ve been there lately and it has been a profound experience, Cuba:
asus, antonio maceo, amor, amigos, ain, antivirus, avira, alba, aduana, as
I’m sure @nhaima is smiling while seeing these words, because hell yeah, over there they really google antivirus software (avira is one of them) a lot because it’s a world without the Internet, thus without free software: you’re condemned to using Windows stuff, and you take what you pay for. Antonio Maceo was a hero of the 19th century revolution, and he’s in the heart of Cuban people. Amor, Amigos! :-)
Anyway, looks like simple queries like this really give an insight on what a population thinks and/or needs, because they’re surely generated by the search trends, thus are the “most searched words”. Am I discovering hot water? Maybe, but it was funny to rediscover it. Just make sure not to hammer the /s service with too many requests, because they’ll anyway be handled by the same cluster of machines, thus you’ll be banned early (I’ve been :-p).