For one thing, there are now a small number of golden tickets: if a searcher hesitates for even the shortest time between typing letters, auto-suggestions and results show up… and presumably many searches start with a Latin character.

So I thought it would be interesting to find out what the first suggestions are for queries searching with each letter of the Latin alphabet. And here they are:

Note that only D, Q and W bring up a generic word, rather than a brand name directly. This might seem slightly surprising (since appending ‘.com’ to all these brand names will get you straight to their web site), but entirely consistent with this sort of behavior.

Note that these are not the same as the results brought up if you simply enter a single letter in to the search box. If you simply search for ‘H’, you’ll be told about Planck’s Constant and hydrogen – but if you start to type a search with ‘H’, Google thinks you’re most likely to then type ‘otmail’, and the results show accordingly.

Because of that distinction, I’m sure that SEOing your web site for a targetted single letter won’t help – the suggestions are presumably based on vast statistics about which phrases users end up typing after initial stems.

I also tried the same test on Google’s mobile search, vainly hoping that there might be some sign that people might be looking for different things when they are mobile. Maybe ‘directions’ might beat ‘dictionary’ when on the move, eh? But no: they were all exactly the same – bar one. (Strangely YouTube beat Yahoo on the mobile auto-suggest.)

I am sure this list isn’t curated: one hopes that would have put paid to dusty old MapQuest… But there are a few interesting entries in the list. Do more people search for REI than ‘realty’? (Who are REI?) And is ‘Sears’ really the most popular search starting with ‘S’?

For completeness, here are the top suggestions for single numeric digits:

And finally, one that made me hopeful for the future of web design:

“Don’t vote for Hillary; it might break FreeBase!”

Open it back up again …indeed, the facts are hidden.

(NB: I find this completely amazing. Why the hell would it do this?)

I wonder… How many distinct musical sources can a human ear distinguish? Does it help if they are different genres? How many iPods are required to create perfect whitenoise?

Exactly what I need to let users define their own layouts of mobile device information web parts.

Oh… did I just give away a secret?

 - approximately 2 weeks before I leave the area to go and live abroad.

So I guess I can’t help them be more than just them

Hilariously, I was in “Ultra First Class” – which is preumably where the 7-foot+ basketball players sit. I did in fact have 10 feet of leg room. Thank you Mark Cuban.

Less impressed were those ‘business class’ travellers who were relegated to the economy seats at the back of the plane (for the physiotherapists and score-keepers?). Oh, and we did arrive fairly late and I had to run for the connecting flight.

Coming home even my humour didn’t last though… at the JFK check-in desk: “We’ve got bad news; the flight’s just left the UK”.

Well, there’s no way I’m waiting eight hours for a departure at 4am, and a wrecked weekend. So, a nifty hop onto the monorail, a phone to the travel agency, and two hours later I’m flat, asleep, and on my way home – no thanks to my scheduled carrier.

So a skeptic proven right I guess. And I still don’t know what a MaxJet plane actually looks like.

Now, there’s a direct flight from Gatwork (45 mins away) to Charlotte. But it’s a bit pricey this late in the day.

So we’re trying MaxJet. MaxJet appears to me to be to business class what EasyJet is to economy. But let’s see. I’m game.

But they fly from Stanstead to Washington, and then I connect down to Charlotte. So I’m already grumpy. It’s at least 2 and half hours to Stanstead, and then I have to change. It makes it almost like a 3-leg journey.

I get to check-in. Oh dear – their plane’s out of action. We’re having to use someone else’s. Lots of people complaining that their seats don’t recline (and so on)

I’m not cheerful at this point. I could have been half way to Greenland by now. (And I’m stuck in Essex – the horror of it all!)

But… someone’s smiling down on me. They’ve reassigned all the seats. This other plane has different classes and I seem to have been put right up the front in “Ultra Premium Business Class”. Well; that sounds interesting.

I struggle past hoards of package flights to the MaxJet lounge. At least I can get some peace and quiet.

Oh. Whoah. They have free wifi in the lounge.

I love MaxJet

Say what you like about the UK health service – all that matters to me is that the bedside telephone doubles up as an internet terminal!

So here I am cut off from the real world, but completely immersed (as usual) in my on-line existence. The only downside is the lack of mobile, but I think writing my blog from an NHS bed trumps Dan Applequist’s Blackberry.