Pagan Suckled in a Creed Outworn
Ok, this new “type-ahead” feature in the Firefox search bar is crazy. I was starting to type in a search, got no farther than typing the initial “p”, and it suggested “Pagan Suckled in a Creed Outworn”.
WTF!?
Ok, this new “type-ahead” feature in the Firefox search bar is crazy. I was starting to type in a search, got no farther than typing the initial “p”, and it suggested “Pagan Suckled in a Creed Outworn”.
WTF!?
March 2nd, 2007 at 8:06 pm
YMMV. When I type “p” into the Google box, I get this list:
PUBPAT
Pinafore “if you …
Pocahontas Disney
Pournelle fascism
Python license
Proactiv ripoff
parrot perl
parsed fish
perl -0
perl exponentiat…
pig etymology
pinball site:www …
pintle etymology
posix stat
ptrdiff_t
public “harmless …”
pypy
I recognize all these as things I’ve searched for personally; then comes a gray tearline and these:
paypal
pc world
photobucket
play.com
pizza hut
ps3
planes
people search
paris hilton
psp
All of which look like plausible highly popular google searches.
Anyway, here’s the actual Wordsworth sonnet, if you haven’t looked for it already:
The World is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers:
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon,
The winds that will be howling at all hours
And are up-gather’d now like sleeping flowers,
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
It moves us not. Great God! I’d rather be
A pagan suckled in a creed outworn,
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathéd horn.
March 3rd, 2007 at 8:28 am
John, that’s the weird thing: it wasn’t showing my own searches. I don’t think I’d heard that particular phrase before, let alone searched for it. I did search for another Wordsworth quote, “The child is the father of the man“, last year.
Also weird– but more expected– is that a different list shows up on my mac, which is a list of things I’ve searched for(”preternatural”, “portsmouth nh furniture”, “poland me”, “passat wagon mpg”, “pepys diary”, “paper boston”) and then the same generic list you have.
March 5th, 2007 at 5:03 pm
Perhaps the purpose of the new feature is not to anticipate what you want to know, but what it thinks you need to know.
March 5th, 2007 at 6:52 pm
I like that. It certainly picked out my next blog post topic for me, didn’t it?
March 5th, 2007 at 7:11 pm
Perhaps a playful sense of irony is also part of the feature.