What boyfriends and girlfriends search for on Google

http://www.predictablyirrational.com/?p=704

by davidw • 17 years ago

262 94 17 years ago

btilly8• 17 years ago

I thought the obvious next version was interesting as well. It doesn't exactly paint a very nice picture of men.

How can I get my husband to ...fall in love with me again ...be more affectionate ...love me again ...help around the house ...want me ...be more romantic ...lose weight ...talk to me ...leave the house ...stop drinking

How can I get my wife to ...love me again ...swing ...lose weight ...shave ...trust me again ...love me ...shut up

I assume that I got more common completions for the first than the second because women are more likely to use Google to seek advice.

mrcharles2• 17 years ago

If you pair the questions together, they solve themselves!

btilly8• 17 years ago

I thought this was just a cute flippant answer until I went back and re-read both lists.

The pairing isn't perfect, but it is surprisingly good.

mrcharles2• 17 years ago

I'll admit, it's a tad sexist, but it's still good for a laugh.

nostrademons2• 17 years ago

There's an opportunity here for an Answers-like service...

leelin• 17 years ago

If you intersect the two sets, everyone wants to get back together or scheme up a George Costanza-like plan to have the partner be the one to initiate a breakup.

pavel• 17 years ago

This is an amazing visualization which does the same exact thing http://hint.fm/seer/

est• 17 years ago

default search results from French Google I guess?

binarycheese2• 17 years ago

http://i49.tinypic.com/nogciv.png

mahmud• 17 years ago

You know, this is the second story about Google auto-completion this week. The behavioural economists have jumped on the Ajaxian/ReadWriteWeb/SmashingMag bandwagon memes.

telemachos3• 17 years ago

Is it me or is anyone else surprised that people use Google this way? I don't mean the content, I mean the kind of query.

I generally type specific words or phrases (often with a 'site:' prefix when I know where I'm looking). I never type full questions (i.e., sentences) into Google.

Edit: My wife reminded me that there was a New York Times article in December about how children search this way automatically: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/26/technology/internet/26kids...

sev• 17 years ago

I've ran into the general public way too much to be surprised by such queries.

shaddi• 17 years ago

First, some people just search this way on a regular basis. Strange, but I've met several who do. Bless their hearts.

Second, often for queries of this type I'd expect to find hits on advice sites, Yahoo Answers, etc, where the question is actually in the text of the page.

Also, I would have trouble boiling down most of these questions to keywords...

telemachos3• 17 years ago

> Also, I would have trouble boiling down most of these questions to keywords...

Right, and fair enough. But to me that's a clue to the real answer: don't ask a search engine to solve your romantic issues.

randallsquared• 17 years ago

I didn't search this way for years, but now I often do, especially when I know less about the area I'm searching in.

Sometimes I don't even know enough to know what keyword to use, and full questions seem more likely to give Google something to work with in that case.

zackham• 17 years ago

I often search this way first, and if I don't find a suitable result, leverage my assumptions about how searching works. I don't know what Google is doing behind the scenes, so my assumptions may be wrong. I like to give Google the benefit of the doubt though, because I know there is an eventual goal of supporting this type of querying.

btilly8• 17 years ago

I'm not surprised.

I sometimes type in full questions because I know that Google prefers to find the full phrase I give it, which means that I'm more likely to come up with a page answering that exact question rather than one with that phrase. Given that I type reasonably quickly, there isn't much overhead in the extra typing.

scott_s• 17 years ago

Sometimes I have difficulty coming up with the keywords I need to search for a topic. Finishing the sentence "How do I ..." sometimes helps. Once I've done that, I might as well search for that before refining.

stevenbedrick• 17 years ago

Not just children- back in the early days of information retrieval user interface studies, they found that pretty much all search-naïve users instinctively use natural language (or at least "natural-language-ish") queries instead of keyword/boolean queries. This, of course, is the opposite of how search engine designers and programmers think about the problem.

For a more thorough discussion, I'd suggest taking a look at Marti Hearst's "Search User Interfaces" (specifically section 4.1.2, on keyword query specification: http://searchuserinterfaces.com/book/sui_ch4_query_specifica... ).

whatusername• 17 years ago

I've started to do this more and more.

Think about this: Google is better at optimising itself for my query than I am trying to optimise my thoughts for google.

silentbicycle2• 17 years ago

That's been one of Google's strengths for a while, though - searching without worrying about "x AND NOT y" markup. DWIM.

Herring4• 17 years ago

>Google is better at optimising itself for my query than I am trying to optimise my thoughts for google.

What, no. Not even close. That would require natural language processing & i doubt google even dreams of that.

jonny_noog2• 17 years ago

I'm not surprised because I have heard that people use Google in this "asking a question" way (I'll call it the "Ask Jeeves Technique"). None the less it still feels odd to me. This is because when I am searching for an answer to a question on Google, I will usually type in a portion of the answer that I feel would be predictable, To take a random example: "The population of Iceland is" (with actual quotes so as to pick up the whole phrase). I don't have a name for this technique (perhaps "Answer Prediction" or the "Reverse Ask Jeeves Technique"), but I usually find it works to my satisfaction. Otherwise, I'm like you, I type in separate keywords that don't make a complete sentence.

I have theorised in the past that perhaps the reason some people use the "Ask Jeeves technique" while I and others might use the "Answer Prediction" technique might be due to me having a clearer general understanding of the way that search engines collect and index their data, i.e. (to oversimplify things for the purpose of illustration) I get that the search engine is just matching text patterns to my query, where as perhaps less technical people don't really understand this and if they think of it at all, they might unconsciously imagine that the Google search page is the interface to some kind of Sky Net like artificial intelligence that is able to take their question, ponder it and provide the most relevant answers. Maybe anthropomorphising our tools is the human default?

Or maybe I'm totally off base here... just some random musings really.

shawndumas• 17 years ago

The 'Jeopardy Technique'?

Herring4• 17 years ago

Technically you're selecting the results you wanna see, so it doesn't tell you how frequent they are. The ranking only tells you relative frequency. You already knew there's someone somewhere who searches like that.

paraschopra• 17 years ago

I guess you are an outlier then. Most people will type in full questions and expect Google and answer them automatically

yason2• 17 years ago

I was about to post the same observation. I would never google for something like this. I think of words that would be likely to occur on a page containing what I'm looking for. Sometimes I quote parts of a phrase such as "how to" to ensure I'm likely to find only how to kind of posts.

ugh2• 17 years ago

Hey, works across cultures! The results in German are pretty much an exact mirror image. That would be cool if it weren’t so depressing.

DrJokepu• 17 years ago

I don't find it depressing at all. Men want a more active / interesting sexual life with their partner. Women want more bonding with their partner / want their partner to do stuff for them. It's nothing we haven't known for many millenia.

Clearly there are a lot more into relationships but these are the most common "entry-level" problems and there's nothing wrong with that. People who have enough experience at human relationships (because they're old enough) won't use Google to solve their problems, don't you think?

joe_the_user3• 17 years ago

Actually, both partners want both. Perhaps there's a little more emphasis with women on the partner side but "last longer in bed" was also among the choices.

ugh2• 17 years ago

No, not depressing because of that. Depressing because my estimation of my fellow males is so far off. I always thought more highly of us :)

ptn• 17 years ago

You can get a couple more if you drop the "to":

How can I get my gf

and

How can I get my bf

slig• 17 years ago

How can I get my parents works too.

nostrademons2• 17 years ago

I had it autocomplete [how can i get my par] and most of them were sensible suggestions, until it got to [how can i get my parakeet to eat my diarrhea]. WTF?

chris1232• 17 years ago

"Everyone thinks of changing the world [his or her girlfriend or buyfriend], but no one thinks of changing himself." --Leo Tolstoy

djb_hackernews• 17 years ago

buyfriend? intentional, mistake, or Freudian?

chris1232• 17 years ago

Mistake, Freudian, or my dyslexia :)

berlinbrown• 17 years ago

Try wife and husband ... "how can i get my wife to shut up"

silentbicycle2• 17 years ago

I'm guessing that one pairs with, "how can I get my husband to stop drinking"...

joe-mccann• 17 years ago

Reading "Predictably Irrational" now and it is a truly fascinating book. This is a good laugh, but the book offers more useful data and insight.

almost8• 17 years ago

Is anyone else a little disturbed that this has 121 points and is at the top of the HN frontpage? Maybe I'm just being grumpy but it seems like total fluff that's of no use to anyone. I'm surprised it hasn't been killed, are there no mods around today?

kiba• 17 years ago

Why do you think it is fluff that is of no use to anyone.

It is not like HNers aren't interested in girls.

almost8• 17 years ago

So you think it provides some insight into something or other? Not just a cheap laugh? It seems to me to be quite a long way from "anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity".

smokinjuan2• 17 years ago

I just got an account today after lurking a few months and read the FAQ just after reading the "Built By Google" story. To poke fun at the FAQ "OMG HN is turning into reddit!!1!" It all ties together nicely from an AI standpoint though. Granted the material is generated by users, but isn't there a hint of AI to it? Look past what the user typed and rather how they're using the service. It's tech and it's a "hack."

almost8• 17 years ago

I'm not sure I understand what you're saying in this comment.

mhansen• 17 years ago

Hit the 'flag' link. If enough people do that, it'll be killed automatically, without need for any mods.

almost8• 17 years ago

I have. I'm courious as to what others see in it though... It's up high in the /classic view to so clearly it's not just a bunch of newcomers.

pkaler• 17 years ago

I think it is very useful. I will type partial searches into Google the next time I put together a customer survey.

almost8• 17 years ago

Please don't. Think of all the confounding factors.

davidw2• 17 years ago

I probably wouldn't have posted it a few months ago, but seeing some of what goes by lately I figured it wouldn't hurt. It's amazing that it got so many points though - it's really not that interesting. Especially compared to some of my other recent submissions that I thought would be way more interesting to this crowd in terms of startups and hacking.

almost8• 17 years ago

That I see as the problem, because now a whole bunch of other people will see this and think the same as you and we end up drowning in the stuff. Because of course this sort of stuff appeals to the lowest common denominator and doesn't require any mental effort whatsoever to process it tends to get lots of votes and drown out the more interesting but possible slightly challenging material.

scorpion032• 17 years ago

Its a monday morning. Most Hackers would be busy coding to visit HN anyway.

astine• 17 years ago

It wasn't Monday when I read that comment last night.

bdr• 17 years ago

Note that this doesn't directly tell you what people want. It tells you what people want and aren't getting. For example, the fact that boyfriends don't search for "...love me" doesn't mean that they don't want to be loved; maybe they want to be loved but are loved enough.

Herring4• 17 years ago

Or sex is generally how love is expressed for guys.

for more sad/hilarious results, look up "how can i get my wife/husband.."

jvdh• 17 years ago

Hilarious indeed, number 10 on the "How can I get my wife" list is "s facebook password"

joe_the_user3• 17 years ago

Actually, when I went to the Google box myself, "...love me" was on it.

netcan• 17 years ago

How would you like it if poets coded, huh?

http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/leonardcohen/youhavelovedenou...

eof• 17 years ago

I think it's fair to say if you have something, then you can't want it.

PanMan• 17 years ago

Nice post, but I get different results: For the boys (girlfriends) : http://skitch.com/panman/nq5d5/google

For the girls (boyfriends) : http://skitch.com/panman/nq5d2/google

Seem to be bore in sync..

j_baker• 17 years ago

I'm surprised no one's pointed out the obvious. It's difficult to pull any interpretations out of this based on gender. Remember, there are girls who have girlfriends and boys who have boyfriends too.

swombat2• 17 years ago

I wonder why the font on the middle line is slightly off...

http://skitch.com/swombat/nqhn8

timb• 17 years ago

Because OS X tries to compress letter spacing before cutting the line off.

http://imgur.com/cyTjS.png

See what happens when I resize this window? The text gets squished before it gives up and shows the "..."

swombat2• 17 years ago

Wow, very interesting. Thanks for the explanation!

binarycheese2• 17 years ago

http://i49.tinypic.com/nogciv.png

What boyfriends and girlfriends search for on Google

Related Stories