Google Suggest is a beta service from Google, which attempts to complete search terms for you. As you start typing something, a small drop-down box will appear, showing possible completions.
While the ease-of-use aspect is debatable, concern(s) can be raised about privacy. Suppose your phone number is (408) 867 5309. As you start typing "408 86" into Google Suggest, you see that it comes up on the list of suggestions. Since the suggestions are built from what people have searched for in the past, it means someone (maybe you or someone you know; or maybe someone else) has been searching for that number.
Taking this further: lets say your address is 742 Evergreen Terrace. Try typing "742" into Google Suggest; the third suggestion is this address. That will also lead you to believe that someone has been searching for your address.
While these examples appear contrived, to some extent, they are. With every
new technology one must see how it can be abused; because, if history is
any guide, it will be abused. That's just where we humans are in our
evolutionary process.
Taking this a bit further, I wrote a little Perl script to see what Google Suggest gives for queries starting with "1z". In case you didn't know, UPS tracking numbers start with "1z". My script didn't exhaust all the possibilities (a computationally expensive task), but just expanded strings which seemed promising. For example: if "1z9" gave lots of possible
completions, I tried all the 36 possibilities (digits 0 through 9, and
characters 'a' through 'z') prefixed by '1z9'. If the hits weren't there,
I moved on.
This resulted in 288 results for UPS packages being tracked. Total number of queries to Google's site were about 600 or so (due to a minor flaw in the coding).
Here, for your viewing pleasure, is a (small) list of UPS tracking numbers
as given by Google. The UPS' site was not accessed for this; all the
results were suggested by Google.
One final thing. By looking at the dates associated with the tracking
numbers, one can get a rough idea of when the master DB of suggested
words was put together. There don't appear to any packages from
December, so it appears that the list has not been updated since November.
PS: Added later. I was asked this question, and decided to respond
here also. UPS lists the name of the person who signed for
the package, and whether it was residential or not. Given these two pieces
of information, it is possible (not just theoretically; it works in at least one
case, which is sufficient for an existential proof ;-) ) to see exactly who
ordered the package. Given some well-known origins (Dell, Amazon, etc.), it
may even be possible to tell which merchant that person bought the stuff from
(the existential proof of which is left to the astute reader :-) ). Combine that with the
weight of the package, and you could even tell if the package was a computer, a monitor
or a plasma TV.
And, in response to a Slashdot comment: yes, the script may have skipped some numbers. I didn't want to beat on the Google server too much at the risk of getting banned
