Google Suggest: Optimize your search, minimize your brain
On its blog, Google announced its new search tool, Google Suggest, which will be rolled out as a default feature on Google’s search engine over the next few weeks. The new search assistant will attempt to suggest words for you as you type them into the search box. It is touted as being a time saver by helping you formulate accurate queries, reduce spelling mistakes, and save keystrokes. Sound great doesn’t it? But with Google’s domination in the search market, there is going to be a lot of “suggesting” going on. It makes us wonder what will happen to our ability to think if we let Google think, oops I mean Suggest, for us? Firefox has had this feature for a little while, but we have to admit, it’s pretty darn cool using it directly in Google. Just one thing, though… what in the heck is the Boy Genius band? Can we get in on that?
Oooo..I wonder where they got that idea…Can they say ‘Yahooooooo!’?
My Google search has been using that feature for as long as I can remember…
I love this feature on Yahoo. But seeing how Google is my numero uno search engine, I am more than happy to see such a feature being implemented; although rather late in the game…?
Glenn, its prolly your browser inserting in words for you. Firefox has that feature already. the google thing is slightly different as it will use its search engine data as the basis for its choices that it shows you…
type in “Micr”, you will get Microsoft at the top because that is a higher ranked search term than “Microscope”..it will work something like that..
what impressed me ,for better or for worse, with this new feature is the influence that it will have because so many people use google search
so how do i turn it off?
also, what version of FF automatically did that?
wow .. Google finally managed to get something out of Beta …
FF3 has that Smart Location toolbar that will try to guess your URL as you type it in. It pulls the suggestions from your browser history. Here is how to disable it:
http://support.mozilla.com/tr/kb/How+to+disable+the+Smart+Location+Bar
Also, the google toolbar in FF3 has that same suggestions feature. Dont know how to disable it.
I too like the feature in firefox. I presume it ranks the results by the most frequent search terms. I use that information to help in my own AdWord marketing.
Kelly, Glenn is right. It’s not his browser, Yahoo has had this feature for some time, called “search assist”. You can turn it on/off. Perhaps Yahoo is playing nice with Google about it seeing that they have that ad partnership deal?
neat that you can turn it on/off..I dont use yahoo search so I havent used that feature..I use google out of habit…. perhaps I should expand my horizons by not having google autoload when I launch my browser..:-)
Noticed this the other day. Initially I thought it was the same old “autocomplete” feature thats been on the browser for years.
I’m pissed it doesn’t offer “adult” suggestions.
Kelly,
I don’t know… I’m currently using IE7 on my personal computer and it’s been doing it for quite some time… also at work I’m using IE6 and it’s been doing it as well.
It wasn’t the browser because it also returned search result web page counts as I was typing the words…
Wow, did you drag this report out of 2002? Google Suggest is old news. The API has been cloned a million times as javascript open source widgets that any self-respecting web developer has had in their arsenal for years.
As for the comment about ‘finally something from beta’… any idea how many BILLION requests this will add to the search farm every day? Nothing to do with being beta, everything to do with basic ROI calculations and raw bandwidth.
I like BGR but stories like this, yawn… slow day at the office?
Old News… They have been doing this for a long time… Definitely not BGR worthy news!
google has not done this. You internet browser does it. (and thank god for you people that learned to hack the firefox reg to disable it)
The reason i use google is because it doesnt do shit like this. If i wanted yahoo, id go to yahoo.