Auto-complete this

Google, the benevolent overlords of the Internet, have invented a thousand different ways of efficiently getting pornography from the big wide world down the phoneline and into your home. Search their image database for just about anything, and you’ll end up with page after page of grot. In fact, go and search for snooker or bleach, with the safe-search option off. Of course you’ve got the safe search option off already, haven’t you? You make me sick. Oh, don’t do it at work. Horrible, isn’t it. And it’s all a bit your fault.

Even with YouTube, G-mail, Google Reader, Maps and all their other weird categorisation tools, their best feature by an absolute sodding mile is auto-complete. You know when your wife starts typing www.hotmail.com into your browser, and it instantly, helpfully, suggests the last three hundred sites you’ve visited beginning with hot? Brilliant bloody thing. Thanks, Firefox.

Google has its own version, where you start typing in what you want to find out, and it suggests what other people have been looking for.

So if you type “Led”, it predicts you want Zeppelin. Type “lesbian”, and it’s like it can read your mind, suggesting “lesbian art” and “lesbian film festivals”.

Even though this saves you bashing your ham-fisted fingers onto the keyboard and typing out your full search, the best bit about it is that you can tap in to the power of the world (such as it is) and find out the questions that other people have been asking.

Like this.

Have a play for yourself. Remember, if you can think of something offensive, chances are you’re not first.