There's been a lot of buzz about Google Suggest lately: the beta site offers a drop-down menu under the search-entry field that offers per-keystroke updated suggestions about your search as you type. But here's a variation: start typing a literary quotation and see how many letters you have to enter before you start getting productive-looking hits.
I got as far as "all her fav" before finding Camper Van Beethoven's "All Her Favorite Fruit" (maybe not literature to you, but it is to me), to "my god" before I hit links to sites on Kubrik's "2001: A Space Odyssey," and to "till hu" before I hit the quote from Eliot's "Prufrock"--although the top hits on that one were to an Australian movie that quotes the poem as its title.
It's sort of a Web-populist view of culture, I assume: the more highly ranked Google sites with portions of quote will rank more highly. If nothing else, the type-ahead technology makes it easier to look up quotes. (And if you're like me--and I know you wish you weren't--I frequently am reminded of a fraction of a quote somewhere and I head to Google to track it down. Underdog thinks this behavior is extremely funny, in a pathetic, obsessive-compulsive sort of way.)
Posted by johndan at December 14, 2004 01:16 AM | TrackBack