delphipsmith: (George)
delphipsmith ([personal profile] delphipsmith) wrote2016-02-01 08:02 pm

Why is my browser so boring?

There is a meme circulating: put the letters of the alphabet into your search window and write down the first auto-complete for each. Other people get all kinds of interesting things ([livejournal.com profile] shyfoxling got "dg33fb led connectors" for D and "skankin' pickle" for S, which I don't know what it is but it makes me giggle). When I do it I get precisely what you'd predict if I were, say, George F. Babbitt: A = amazon, B = best buy, and so on down to Y = youtube and Z = zillow.

What does this mean? Why is my browser so conventional, so dull, so uninteresting? Let the record show that I have never searched for zillow in my life, and really who needs to google Amazon when you can just type in "amazon.com"?

I did notice today that if I type "what is" into google, the first autocomplete is "what is a caucus". No surprise there; it's a very unfamiliar concept to most Americans, even if you have had it explained to you as a child by a Dodo.

Edit: Ah, I believe I have sussed it out. It's because I do private browsing and clear my cache every time I close my browser. This means my search history never gets stored, so all google has to offer me is the most popular search for a given letter.

So my browser isn't boring, I'm just very very secretive :)

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