I usually never pay attention to the auto complete suggestions offered by Google, until now, when I found they can be quite amusing. What’s even more fun though, is repeating a search across different country specific sites, to get a idea of what the people of that nation are most worried about. Here’s a sampling, let’s start with India:

Learning proper English shows up prominently in the list, as does a fair bit of curiosity about Orkut. Now, for the Netherlands:

I guess the one take-away from this is that the English speaking Dutch population (which is quite large, mind you) are mostly looking for more info on some romantic comedy from Hollywood. I was also curious about the results for the USA:

Hmm, why are there so many Americans wanting to learn to “tie a tie”? “How to solve a Rubix cube” is about the only intellectual entry to appear on the suggestion list among all three countries, until you realize that it’s actually spelled “Rubik’s”. I wouldn’t be surprised if “Rubix” makes the dictionary soon.

The common theme for all countries seems to be: learning to kiss. Both “losing weight” and “reducing weight” turn up in the Indian list, and so does “gain weight”, a term that’s entirely absent from the American one. Weight doesn’t feature in the Dutch results at all — perhaps not surprising in a country where everyone cycles everywhere. Downloading videos from Youtube shows up for the Indian and Dutch lists but not the American one.

The geeks out there will notice the UI improvements on the US version of Google over the other two. I think I’ll stop drawing inferences now.

Try your own fun searches to see what auto-suggest has in store! Suggested starting point: “How to use”…