Google Suggest

Posted on August 26, 2008

If you have used the Google Toolbar you have already experienced Google Suggest, the search helper that drops down a list of possible searches as you begin typing your search terms. The more you type, the more refined the suggestions become, of course.

Well, after testing and using it minimally for some time, Suggest is finally coming to Google.com.

For example, start typing [poodle] into the search box at Google Suggest, and below the box, you start seeing suggestions such as:

poodle rescue
poodle skirt
poodle puppies
poodle mixes
poodle for sale
poodle breeders
poodle grooming

It’s easy to move your cursor down to any of the suggestions to select that as your search.

Google Suggest was rolled out as a Google Labs project back in late 2004. Several other search engines were already offering drop-down suggestions similar to Google Suggest, so Google was hardly a pioneer in the field.

Since then, Google has offered Google Suggest selectively, such as we said through the Google toolbar and also the Firefox search box, Google Maps, Google News, and YouTube.

Google says the reason it has taken so long for them to roll it out to the main Google search page is their continued emphasis on quality, wanting to make sure that the millions who use Google won’t be turned off by a list of bogus suggestions for their search terms.

The suggestions come from looking in aggregate at searches that happen on Google and listing popular ones that contain the word you enter. Next to each suggestion, Google shows you the number of Google results that match the suggestion.

If you like the idea behind Google Suggest, check out Yahoo. It offers an even more sophisticated query suggestion tool. Even the new search kid Cuil already offers suggestions. So since they are last to the game, we’ll see if Google’s suggestions are worth the wait. There’s only one real reason they should be and that’s because they’re aggregating millions more searches to draw from.

Everyone should see it appear by then end of the week.