When I start typing into the address bar in my browser, the browser pops up a guess as to where I want to go – based, I assume, on where I’ve most often gone in the past.
Out of boredom, I just typed the alphabet, letter by letter, to see the results. Most were what I’d have expected (Amazon Google IMDB Netflix StraightDope (where else?) Yahoo) and a few had no one-letter suggestions filled in (clearly I have no favorite “K” or “Q” sites.)
What baffles me are a couple I would have sworn I’d never visited in my life: Cropchatter and PrimalPasture. Do I have some homeless farmer breaking in to use my computer??
Anyway, if your browser does this, take a look. Do you have any really strange sites popping up as your ‘favorites’?
Most of mine are pretty much what I expected. A lot of straight dope pages, wikipedia, credit card, phone, gas, electric, the company I work for, etc.
For whatever reason, “a” popped up outlook, because apparently Firefox thinks that outlook.office.com has an “a” in it somewhere. Outlook and craigslist both come up for “e”. Must be a hidden “e” in there somewhere that I don’t normally use. Stupid Firefox. Craigslist comes up under “j” too.
I was kinda surprised that I had regularly visited web pages for every letter except X and Z, though it still tried to auto-fill in some youtube videos for those letters (X and Z show up in the gibberish letters that youtube uses to code their videos).
I was also surprised that Amazon didn’t come up for “a”. I don’t shop there much, just mostly a few items around the xmas season, but I still do go there every once in a while.
K brought up user profiles here that I had taken a look at, and Q brought up both our time card system at work (which has a Q in its name) and an online comic that I read.
As for your homeless farmer links, those may have come from pop-up ads or something like that. I have my browser fairly tightly locked down so I don’t get any weird links like that.
Huh. Even if you’ve never clicked on an ad for a site? I mean, I don’t even garden, let alone grow ‘crops’ or deal with pastures.
Though I’ve realized another weirdness. J came up with JCPenny, which, okay, I have gone there while price checking something. OTOH, there’s a site called “Jigzone” which has a daily jigsaw puzzle, and I must go there at least 3-4 times a week when I want a little mindless break. So… a site I may have visited six times last year outranks a site I’ve absolutely visited 150+ times? Strange.
Though… I use a bookmark to get to jigzone. Maybe bookmarks don’t count?
It’s probably using Google Autocomplete. The browser may partially be showing your previous searches/websites, and partially Google’s guesses, based on the searches of other people.