While optimising some GooSug code earlier today (as you do), I inevitably typed in “foo” (as you do), and came across an interesting little bug.

Example:

Go to Google Suggest and type in “foo”.

The bottom result is “foodnetwork.com”, and claims to return 1 result. Which it does. Go down to it, and press right.

This is where it gets interesting. First, Google seems to be randomly concatenating keywords in the results, and claims they return 1 result. However, most of them don’t.

The Big Question: Why?

The most boring theory comes from the “foodnetwork.cominthekitchen” suggestion. This does, in fact, return results. More accurately, one result, which is a scrape site. That’s clearly how Google has picked up on it. Perhaps the other results are similar scrape sites that have produced these concatenated phrases.

This leads us to the conclusion that the results data for GooSug is old. Hmm…

Anyway that’s as far as this post goes, as I’m just a programmer. That, and I have scrapers to optimise :-)