Google’s Suggest feature was taken out of beta testing and added to the world-renown search engine giant’s front page not more than a year ago, and has proven to be a very useful tool in finding similar search queries as you type them. But the new tool has also become a target of criticism for it’s (mostly) unfiltered suggestions, as many point out.

The utility offers search suggestions below the text input based on completing what the user has typed so far with a list of suggestions based on popular searches by other users. For instance, typing “the dog” would return a list of the most popular searches beginning with “the dog”, not necessarily ranked by order of results.

The code behind Google Suggest filters out a list of obvious keywords, e.g. “porn”, from the suggestions, but the filtering still allows some pretty surprising suggestions to appear. Here, we’ve attempted to compile a collection of screenshots depicting the most shocking suggestions for the most open-ended search terms.

The screenshots were taken of a Windows Server 2003 virtual machine, running Internet Explorer 6 on top of a Linux installation (the Gnome screenshot utility caused the suggestions to disappear because of the way the keyboard was handled). They also seem to overrun part of the right sidebar, so just bear with us.

Here are the best suggestions:

A national tradgedy, yet the suggestions seem to say otherwise?

suggestions returned for how to...

Why is...

How 2...

Unix is what?!

Bill gates...

Just to be fair...

And now for the software company suggestions:

Microsoft is...

Google is...

Apple is...

Sun Microsystems is...

Suggestions on popular software products?

Vista suggestions?

Gmail is...

Emacs? (to be fair, vim didn't have any interesting suggestions)

And now for our “kid’s section”:

Dora was WHAT?

Never liked barney anyway

And I thought he was real... and *not* the devil

The easter bunny...

Myspace is...

And here’s a few more just for good measure:

George Orwell would have laughed

Computers in general...

suggestions on our president?

The possibilities are endless...

Well, I hope you enjoyed those as much as I did. Just to clear things up, we at The Coffee Desk don’t necessarily condone any of the suggestions listed above, we just like to laugh at them in respect to the search terms they were generated from. We don’t necessarily dislike any of the companies or individuals listed above, although it’s pretty obvious that some people do. That said, see what you can find on your own – it sure makes for a fun way to kill a few hours!