Weird (web search, non intrusive) surveillance occurrence, talk me down

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

Or don’t. This is MPSIMS, after all.

[Rhetorical] Do any of you know who John Vanderslice is? I would imagine that maybe a dozen folks reading this know of him. I’m probably being generous with that estimate. This thread isn’t about who Vanderslice is. What I’m really questioning is whether his level of renown would allow him to appear in the autofill window of a google search request.

Yesterday, I thought of him while listening to a college radio DJ who was playing (rock, alternative, strange) songs about birds. Vanderslice has a song about a bird -he may have many- but this song about a bluebird staring at him all day, well, I thought it to be a fitting addition to the DJ’s playlist. I had no intention of calling in, the point is that it tickled a memory I hadn’t had in years.

I didn’t remember the song’s name, but I remembered the artist’s name and the specifics about the bird that I mentioned above. I assumed I’d type that into the Google, and with that info, I’d be able to find the song. Well, you guys know what happened, I typed in the word “john” and the second choice on the autofill list was “John Vanderslice.”

I haven’t heard or even thought about the song (or Vanderslice) in more than 10 years. He’s on none of my playlists or shazaams, and I own none of his music. As mentioned, I probably googled him years ago, but surely I’ve Googled a shit-ton of John’s since then.

Anyway, I’ve had other occurrences of Autofill surprising me, but it’s often associated with recent googling, news events, or even conversations in the room. And I’m not really surprised, I know they’re watching. But this happened with out any setup/foreshadowing/stacking the deck/shouting it to the heavens/ what-have-you.

And all of this reminds me of Sly5thAve & JSWISS’s song “Watching Me”. I thought JSWISS was entertaining us with hyperbole in that song, but after this occurrence, I’m picking up more tin foil on my next trip to the grocery.

2

I know who he is and like his music (I love his first album, Mass Suicide Occult Figurines). I looked him up on this computer via allmusic.com and then did a Google search and he was the second in the list. I then tried this on a different computer and he didn’t show up at all, even when I typed “john v”. I had to get to “john van” until he was one of the drop down options.

Very odd that he showed up for you if you haven’t been searching for him or listening to his music. Any black helicopters hovering outside?

3

I get John Podesta first on Google. It requires up to John Vand for him to show up on the list.

4

I’m going to guess that you have googled other musicians similar to John Vanderslice, and Google knows you like artists in this genre.

Here’s an example that just happened to me last night: I was perusing a list of breweries participating in an upcoming event, and I was googling a few of the names I didn’t recognize. After searching for a couple, I typed in “side” and the first suggested result was “Side A Brewing”. I typed “spider” and the first result was “Spider City Brewing”. Obviously, those won’t be on the list for anyone else, but my context was searches for breweries, so they were top suggestions for me.

So one way or another, Google guessed you were searching for musicians.

5

Same.


@oligArchie:
Their algorithm is very context aware. Both in time and in geography. If you were the third person in 5 minutes during that DJ’s show to ask about a John, then it coming up with Vanderslice is not too surprising.

Try the same prompt again now and I bet he’s not the first choice.

6

Same here, and I still don’t know who he is. But then he comes second. Same in the German wikiedia, where he is then third. He does not feature in the Spanish wikipedia with his own entry, but he is mentioned in some entries about other people. The English wikipedia shows him after typing John van as the 8th option.
Now I am going to read about him.

7

Oh. Dang. I thought I was just being psychic.

Silly me :upside_down_face:

8

I’m not even sure what Vanderslice’s genre would be called. However, that doesn’t mean that I’ve not searched for music similar to his. I do hear some off-path stuff on college radio.

In re-reading my op, I left out a detail that weighs the scale in Google’s favor. That is, I selected the bona-fide Google app on my phone for yesterday’s search. I just tried it again and just typing J, it fills in with John Vanderslice. But Firefox and DuckDuck on my phone forced me to type “john vand” before it suggested him as an autofill.

On this machine, I just checked my autofill results with duckduck in Firefox, Google in Safari, and duckduck on the Orion browser in which I typed and submitted my OP. All times, I had to go as far as “john vand” before he became an autofill option.

I have to assume that since I use my phone to shazam, to play my shazam list, and play shazam or Apple Music when I drive through the week, that Google is sensitive to my love of music. It’s still creepy that it seems to know what’s in my head before I type it. Hmmm. Maybe I’ve been talking in my sleep :slight_smile:

9

Yes, this is very relevant. I missed that he did it so soon after the song was played.

The current autofill does not contradict this. Getting his name as the second one in a dropdown after typing “John” is very different than having it fill in entirely from just typing “J”. That is almost certainly based on is remembering past searches. Heck, it sounds like it was device-based, so Android or iOS’s autofill, not Google’s.

His name taking so long to show up in a Google search in Safari on your Mac is pretty good indication that LSLGuy was right.

10

OP mentioned he was listening to a college DJ. Was that over an old-fashioned radio? Or streaming on the device that he moments later typed the scary “John …” search into? And if streaming, using which app and what music service?

11

Everyone’s made some good points. @BigT seems to narrow things down significantly. That is, the behavior is associated with the iOS. I’ve had the phone a good while. I suppose I used it to google Mr. Vanderslice in the past. And at my age, something that I think happened 10 years ago could have been 3 (only a slight exaggeration).
This helps to calm my paranoia. Not that there really was any paranoia, but there was puzzlement. I’m considering this puzzle solved. For now.

Thanks to everyone for your thought and input. I’m going off now to listen to some John Vanderslice and ponder a day in the future when a web surfer stumbles upon this page after google searching for “John Vanderslice.”

12

His first album is fantastic. And, the song “Bill Gates Must Die” is more relevant than ever with the Epstein stuff going on.

13

Since Shazam is owned by Apple, I doubt Google knows too much about your Shazam data, let alone Apple Music.

Maybe I’m not following, but you said this only happens in the Goolge app itself, right? It doesn’t happen in the other phone browsers you used like Firefox and DDG? That makes it sound like Google behavior, not iOS behavior.

14

I listened to the …Figurines album since I last talked to you guys. The Bill Gates song is catchy and may be the jewel of the platter.

Yes, I would agree with you; the behavior seems to be related to Google. That’s really the path I started down. I have to assume that there’s a iOS library specific to the Google app. [shoulders shrugging]?

Oh, so here’s answers to other questions that I overlooked from earlier:
I was listening to over the air radio.
The DJ I was listening to didn’t play this song or this artist during his set.

Considering that last point, though, I searched the station’s historical playlist and “Vanderslice” came up not once since 2024. A bit surprising to me, really. So I took a minute and confirmed their search was working by using some other names I knew it should find.