Qwerty, a long time High Ranking Forum personality, wrote a blog post named Google Related Searches - Cheaters Rejoice. In short, he explains that Google is smart enough to know the answers to the New York Times crossword puzzle, without even seeing the puzzle. How is this done?
Well, according to Qwerty:
So apparently, Google hasn’t indexed the content of the puzzle and related every clue to it. Rather, it looks like it has detected a trend: someone searches on some of the clues, someone else searches on the same clues, someone else searches on some of those and a few others, and this all happens within a few hours, so Google determines that the searches are related to each other based on that, so when I come in and search on one of the clues, Google offers up some of the other searches that were run today by other people who ran that same search.
I wouldn't be surprised if this was indeed true. So any of you looking to cheat on the NY Times crossword puzzle, give this a try next week.
Forum discussion at HighRankings Forum.

Comments:
David Wilkinson
05/04/2009 01:59 pm
The Google Orion update at work. For those interested, it was developed by Ori Allon - Google acquired the technology in 2006 but have only *really* started rolling it out this year. There's more information about this on the AlphaShadow.com site from back in April when we did a feature-length study on it. =) In short, it allows for a *LOT* more expansion as marketers - Google driving more traffic to specific longtail keywords rather than the more general broad ones.
Michael Martinez
05/04/2009 07:17 pm
This AlphaShadow guy seems to be dropping domain references to a blogless site that offers some sort of "quick cash" program. He nailed Bob's blog, too.