Autocomplete This: Guess What Everyone's Googling
A bit of a laff!
Google search's autocomplete suggestions offer strange and wonderful glimpses into what the rest of the world wants to know. It's trying to help us by guessing what we're after, but we're left with a giddy voyeuristic thrill wondering "Who is asking this and why?" Now there's a game based on those autocomplete oddities.
idiots.win [official site] is a free browser game which starts asking Google incomplete questions then shows you five of the top ten autocomplete results - can you guess which is #1? It's a big of a giggle, yeah?
idiots.win, which is amazingly also the game's domain name, is the work of Lemon and Montrith. You might remember Lemon's game about guessing which weird-ass WikiHow articles illustrations have come from, which Adam giggled at a couple of months ago.
Mostly I've learned from playing that people are curious about obscure vegetables, shelving, juicy medical problems, and basic sex education. Surprisingly, the sexy option is rarely the top autocomplete result. Also, for the first time I'm explicitly aware that "split screen" and "sperm" begin with the same two characters.
Okay, sometimes it is the sexy option.