DealBook: Alibaba Invests in a Search Engine for Apps

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DealBook: China Internet Giant Buys Stake in Search Engine

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Bits Blog: A New Role for Amazon: An Engine for Jobs

In Search Engine Results, a Peek at What We Wonder

Search engines have long provided clues to the topics people look up. But now sites like Google and Bing are showing the precise questions that are most frequently asked, giving everyone a chance to peer virtually over one another’s shoulders at private curiosities. And they are revealing interesting patterns.

Frequently asked questions include: When will the world end? Is Neil Armstrong Muslim? Was George Washington gay?

The questions come from a feature that Google calls “autocomplete” and Microsoft calls “autosuggest.” These anticipate what you are likely to ask based on questions that other people have asked. Simply type a question starting with a word like “is” or “was,” and search engines will start filling in the rest.

People who study online behavior also say the autocomplete feature reveals broader patterns, including indications that the questions people ask of search engines often veer into the sensitive and politically incorrect.

“Your search engine is your best friend, and you talk to it about everything, even things you might not talk about to your real best friends,” said Danny Sullivan, editor in chief of Search Engine Land, a Web site that covers the search industry. “It’s a way that search engines reflect society.”

One category of question comes up with puzzling frequency in autocomplete: whether a certain person is gay.

Is Elton John gay? Is Paul Ryan gay? Is Michael Bloomberg gay? The question pops up often, too, when starting searches about George Clooney, the Yankees third baseman Alex Rodriguez, the actress Ellen Page, Genghis Khan, several cartoon characters and even the pope.

This line of questioning is so commonplace that a simple query on Google beginning with “is” can result in autocomplete predicting that you are about to ask, Is Frank Ocean gay? Do the same with Bing, Microsoft’s search engine, and it often fills out the question, Is Robin Roberts gay? Though these questions do not pop up every time, they do appear with surprising frequency.

Nick In’t Ven, senior program manager at Microsoft’s Bing search engine, said that the returns reflect the collective curiosities of its users (and that similar results turn up on Google). He could not say how many times people have to type in a question for it to dominate the feature, but said that for popular single terms, like “Facebook,” it is well into the millions.

Search engine experts said they cannot rule out that the phenomenon is the result of some bug in the system, but they added that it seems very unlikely.

“We base it on experience, what users have asked about around the world,” Mr. In’t Ven said. “We’re trying to reflect the world’s collective intentions.” If people wonder whether other people are gay, “that is the collective intention, and we abide with it.”

Mr. In’t Ven added that he and his colleagues at Microsoft have often discussed some of the strange questions. A few months ago, they became interested in the frequent inquiries from search engine users about cultural stereotypes.

Type “why are Americans,” and the autocomplete choices include “fat,” “stupid” and “patriotic.” Substitute “Chinese,” and the autocompletes include “skinny,” “rude” and “smart.” If autocomplete is any indicator, search engine users regularly wonder if Jews are smarter and whether African-Americans are better athletes.

In a statement, Krisztina Radosavljevic-Szilagyi, a Google spokeswoman, wrote: “The search queries that you see as part of autocomplete are a reflection of the search activity of all Web users.” She declined to give an interview about autocomplete, but added in her note that Google tries to accurately reflect the diversity of what is on the Internet, whether good or bad.

There are other possibilities for why these questions yield impolitic results.

One is the nature of language. Questions beginning with “is” might be more likely to lend themselves to asking about someone’s sexuality than questions beginning with, for example, “where.” However, on Bing, sexual orientation also is a regular topic with questions beginning with the word “was” (Was J. Edgar Hoover gay?).

Bits Blog: New Google Tools to Make the Search Engine More All-Knowing

When Google imagines the future of Web search, it sees a search engine that understands human meaning and not just words, that can have a spoken conversation with computer users and that gives users results not just from the Web but also from their personal lives.

On Wednesday, Google showed a few steps it has taken toward making that all-knowing search engine a reality. The new tools, like voice search that seems to outdo Apple’s Siri, make Google more useful. But some, like one that incorporates personal Gmail messages in search results, could also unnerve privacy-concerned users.

Karen Bleier/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesGoogle’s new tool is being offered to a million users who sign up at g.co/searchtrial.

Speaking at an event for reporters in San Francisco, Amit Singhal, senior vice president in charge of search at Google, called the announcements “baby steps in the direction of making search truly universal” and of building artificial intelligence into the search engine.

The Gmail tool, which Google is still testing with a limited number of users, shows results from Gmail if a user is signed in to his or her Google account. Search for Amazon, for instance, and in addition to links to the shopping Web site and information about the river, you could see the receipt from your recent Amazon.com order. Search “my flights” and Google will cull information about your forthcoming flight from your Gmail messages. Search for baby shower games and Google might show you a relevant but forgotten e-mail chain from last year between you and a friend.

Google says it wants to be able to see in your Gmail inbox that you have a reservation at a restaurant an hour away and alert you that the traffic is bad so you need to leave early, an extension of Google Now, which the company introduced in June. It also plans eventually to include personal information from other Google services like Docs and Drive.

Google is aware that the new tool could raise privacy concerns, a problem it has faced in the past when it tested new products, like Buzz, an ill-fated social network, only with Google employees. That is why the company is first offering it to a million users who sign up at g.co/searchtrial. It also emphasized that users can turn it off by moving a toggle at the top of the search results page or signing out of Gmail, and that all searches are encrypted.

“We have to do this very carefully, we know that,” Mr. Singhal said.

He added, “These are very useful things, services we need to bring to our users, and that’s the only way we can build the search of the future that we all want.”

Google also showed off voice search that seems to go far beyond what Apple’s Siri can do. These tools came to Android phones in June, and Google said it had submitted an app to Apple’s iTunes store that should be available in the next few days. In a demonstration, a Google executive verbally asked Google questions about the weather and maps, but also for more obscure information like a baseball player’s salary, a video on quantum physics and his personal flight information, and each time the search engine responded with the answer in a friendly voice.

Finally, Google showed the latest updates to the Knowledge Graph, which it introduced in May as a way to show real-world things and the connections between them. (Search “Twilight,” for instance, and on the right-hand side appears information about the movie and links to Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson.) Starting Thursday, Google will go further by showing you a horizontal bar of relevant information on top (search “what to do in Paris” and see the Eiffel Tower and the Louvre) and offering more intelligent prompts in auto-complete (search “Rio” and see “Rio de Janeiro” and “Rio, 2011 film.”)

Google also gave some astonishing statistics. There are 30 trillion URLs on the Web, and Google crawls 20 billion Web pages a day and does 100 billion searches a month.

Metal Gear Creator’s Fox Engine to Be Shown Next Month

Metal Gear creator Hideo Kojima will show off the Fox Engine next month. In an interview on the PlayStation Blog, Kojima commented that “although the Fox Engine is not finished we are ready to show what it can do… on August 30th in Japan to be more specific.”

Kojima commented that the engine is “nearly finished, but the only way to be sure it works is to create a game at the same time and improve the engine with our tools as we go along.” The original plan was for that game to be Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance, “but a lot happened along the way and instead it is being made with the engine they have at Platinum Games.”

The Fox Engine debuted at E3 2011. We last heard that it was running on PlayStation 3 and Vita during TGS, and Kojima commented that an actual game using the engine “may take a while.” Kojima Productions later posted job listings for “engineers to help develop next-gen game engine technology for use with the FOX Engine.”

For now, only the engine is confirmed to be making an appearance rather than an actual new game, though with rumors about Metal Gear Solid 5 swirling, anything is possible. Check back to IGN next month for full details on the Fox Engine presentation.