If you think about all the things people search for on Google, “God” has to be pretty high up there, right? I mean, since the dawn of man, people have been searching for the meaning of life and its creator, so what better way to do that than with a search engine? But divinity apparently has nothing on cheap domain names.
When you try to do a search for “God” with the new Google Instant feature, it predicts that you’re going to type in “Godaddy” instead. If you hit a space after the “d”, it thinks you’re looking for “God of War”, the popular videogame. So the only way to actually search for “God” with this new Google Instant feature is to hit the search button.
To make Google Instant work, the search giant looks across all queries to find the most popular ones and then predicts what it thinks you’re going to type and auto-populates the results based on that. Clearly, both “Godaddy” and “God of War” are more popular queries on Google — something that is either humorous or sad depending on your level of religiousness.
Also kind of humorous is that “Godaddy” isn’t really the name of the company, it’s “Go Daddy” with a space (though the domain is of course godaddy.com). Also interesting is that a Go Daddy is a heavy Google AdWords user, and so the first result for the “God” query is a sponsored link for Go Daddy.
Go Daddy itself is currently in the process of looking for a buyer. Perhaps if they started touting the fact that they’re ranked higher than God in Google, they’ll get even more than the $1 billion+ price they’re expected to go for.
[thanks Alex]