This Is The Father Of Autocomplete
2013.08.24
For almost 10 years, Google has been bringing the ability to read your minds for a while already. Now that its so second nature, we vilify other searches that don't have the same functionality or if they are not as good.
AllThingsD sat down with the guy who invented it. That guy is Kevin Gibbs. He put the project together when he first started at Google and launched it back in 2004. AllThingsD explains:
But before the product could launch, Gibbs had to personally create the blacklist of words that wouldn’t appear on Google Suggest.
Since the feature would be actively showing results before someone had finished a query, there was a huge risk of Google putting forth something that offended people — even if it was the most likely result algorithmically.
That meant many hard and strange decisions, Gibbs recalled, about terms like “hooters,” which could mean owls or the restaurant or boobs; and “lesbian sex,” which on its own is descriptive, but when followed by words like “video” is perhaps not appropriate for all eyes. (In the second case, he didn’t remove the root search, but blocked some derivations.) For many letters of the alphabet, the most commonly searched word was “porn.”
Today Gibbs works at a little company called Quip after leaving Google in 2012. Since the feature would be actively showing results before someone had finished a query, there was a huge risk of Google putting forth something that offended people — even if it was the most likely result algorithmically.
That meant many hard and strange decisions, Gibbs recalled, about terms like “hooters,” which could mean owls or the restaurant or boobs; and “lesbian sex,” which on its own is descriptive, but when followed by words like “video” is perhaps not appropriate for all eyes. (In the second case, he didn’t remove the root search, but blocked some derivations.) For many letters of the alphabet, the most commonly searched word was “porn.”
“I don’t feel when I look at a search box that it’s something I did,” Gibbs said. “It feels like this is just how the world’s supposed to work."
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