Ever since launching the project on Labs nearly 4 years ago, Google in the coming week will finally release its Search Suggest, the new feature that forecasts user’s search queries for its main-page at Google.com.
According to the official Google Blog this week reported that the “Suggest” search feature, which lists query suggestions when a user is searching any given subject, will go live over the next week.
The blog, posted yesterday, indicates that Google Suggest will be “graduating” from the company’s Labs department and available by default on the Google.com homepage over the next week.
“We find that by providing suggestions upfront, we can help people search more efficiently and conveniently,” the post read.
The post continuing further stated that the feature has been a long time coming, and has made its way across much of the Google Empire already:
“The Google Suggest feature originally started as a 20% project in 2004, and has since expanded to Google Labs, Toolbar, Firefox search box, Maps and Web Search for select countries, the iPhone and BlackBerry, YouTube, and now Google.com.”
Suggest works similarly by attempting to guess a word or phrase as it is being typed into the search bar, in the same way as the “Did you mean” feature that we often get when we enter a seemingly odd/misspelled search term which the Google engine finds incorrect. Only this time, the suggestion is done real-time:
For example, typing in “prog” would result in a drop down box listing potential queries such as “programming,” “programming languages,” “progesterone,” or “progressive,” the blog said.
The Suggest attribute can help users put together queries when only the stem of a word or part of a sentence is known, the service allows users to view a large amount of frequently searched phrases after entering only a few letters, helping users cut back on typing time and reduce spelling errors.
Google said the suggestions are not based on a user’s personal search history; rather it “uses data about the overall popularity of various searches to help rank the refinements it offers”.
A few other search engines had search suggestions when Google started their Suggest project in 2004, and Yahoo! rolled out a major upgrade to their search suggestions, called Search Assist, about a year ago. Yahoo!’s product is in fact arguably still a bit more complete than Google’s offering.
Besides, Yahoo!’s service conducts a search in the background for the term typed and pulls out related terms from the first 20 pages of results. Yahoo! also suggests terms based on related concepts — i.e., suggestions that do not necessarily contain the exact term you were searching. For example, a search for “Batman,” might also suggest searches for “The Dark Knight,” “The Joker,” or “Gotham City.”
Visiting http://www.google.com will return a user to the ordinary Google search page without Google Suggest enabled. If you would like to try the service out now you can find it here
, though it is not currently activated for everyone.