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Sometimes these systems just make baffling decisions. One time years ago, while waiting for my plane to begin deboarding at JFK Airport in NYC, I tried setting

Sometimes these systems just make baffling decisions. One time years ago, while waiting for my plane to begin deboarding at JFK Airport in NYC, I tried setting my MacBook's timezone to Eastern manually. I started typing "New Y" into the Closest City field. OS X helpfully auto-completed it as "New Yekeba, Liberia": https://evan.tumblr.com/image/65341168142 https://evan.tumblr.com/image/65341168142 As best I can tell, New Yekeba is a tiny resettled former mining town with minimal population. There are very few English-language web pages about it. Somehow this ranked higher for Apple's auto-suggest than the most populous city in the US.

rmtech 6y ago
"e" is alphabetically before "o" ?
mzzter 6y ago
Looks like the autocomplete is going off alphabetical order rather than some other characteristic of the city?
- evanelias 6y ago
  I considered that, but in that case it would have suggested New Yarmouth (among other places) first.
- kshacker 6y ago
  I guess that's the next innovation. In the old days, you enter the entire search string. Then you got Google Suggest where each keystroke was trapped and responded to. Now not only you need to trap each keystroke, you need a weighted list of results so you show them in the order of popularity. Not an Edit: I am pretty sure Google is already doing it so it is not an innovation, its been there for a while. I am calling it so for the folks who are not doing it. Also, it may be there in general search but it may have seemed like excessive data for searching time zones on your phone. But with billions of phone users, such usage would be common and the feature will happen, eventually.
  - jefftk 6y ago
    Weighting results in Search Autocomplete is something Google has done since launching it. (Disclosure: I work at Google, though not on this)
netsharc 6y ago
Hey, it's correct when sorted alphabetically! Good enough, commit and ship it!

rmtech 6y ago

"e" is alphabetically before "o" ?

mzzter 6y ago

Looks like the autocomplete is going off alphabetical order rather than some other characteristic of the city?

evanelias 6y ago
I considered that, but in that case it would have suggested New Yarmouth (among other places) first.
kshacker 6y ago
I guess that's the next innovation. In the old days, you enter the entire search string. Then you got Google Suggest where each keystroke was trapped and responded to. Now not only you need to trap each keystroke, you need a weighted list of results so you show them in the order of popularity. Not an Edit: I am pretty sure Google is already doing it so it is not an innovation, its been there for a while. I am calling it so for the folks who are not doing it. Also, it may be there in general search but it may have seemed like excessive data for searching time zones on your phone. But with billions of phone users, such usage would be common and the feature will happen, eventually.
- jefftk 6y ago
  Weighting results in Search Autocomplete is something Google has done since launching it. (Disclosure: I work at Google, though not on this)

netsharc 6y ago

Hey, it's correct when sorted alphabetically! Good enough, commit and ship it!