The overwhelming majority of people at risk for suicide broadcast many warning signs. Often, they are subtle, but more often, they represent a loud cry for help for an ultimately preventable situation.
Very few people commit suicide on a whim.
I'd bet my life's savings that enough suicidal people search for the word "suicide" that this showed up in metrics.
Having worked at Google, I could take a guess at how these help numbers came to be a feature. Some search engineers were probably analyzing a question along the lines of "What pattern of searches result in unhappy users that don't come back?"
It resulted in a 9% increase of the "calls to hotline" metric, so you can just go ahead and pay him:
> In April we began prominently displaying the number for the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at the top of the results page for certain search queries in the U.S. Since then, our friends at the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline have reported a 9 percent increase in legitimate calls to its hotline.
My uncle took his own life two years ago, and part of his "cry for help" period was him using Google to research suicide. After looking through his internet history, we found it was on more than just one occasion. I'd be willing to bet that many, many people do the same thing.
