San Francisco — Google users can now explore some new enhancements that the web giant is rolling out in bits to its search auto-suggest features, hoping to deliver more personalized results and make searching faster to desired Web sites.
Google Suggest, as the name implies, has unveiled about a half dozen updates to its predictive search results–suggestions that appear in a drop-down menu when a user begin typing a query into the search box.
While the first three imporvements are pretty useful. The modificatinons were announced in detail late yesterday on the company’s official blog to Google Suggest:
The first new feature offers you suggestions on the results page: Whereas before, they only displayed suggestions based on the original search input. But now, when you search from a SERP, Google will give you suggestions related to that keywords on the current SERP. So if you are on a results page for roller coasters (as in the example below) and you begin typing in the search box, the first few suggestions will be roller coaster-related. Hence, giving users additional way to filter their searches.
The second new feature gives you personalized suggestions. Google users who have registered for a personalized Google account will get customized suggestions based on their past searches. If you are logged into Google and have enabled your Web History, then the first few suggestions will be based on past searches.
“We estimate that about a quarter of all signed-in searches are repeats from the past month,” explains a post from Google. “Now, if you are signed in with your Google account and have Web History enabled, we may show some of your relevant past searches as you type.” If you do not like a particular suggestion, you can simply click a “remove” button and you would not see it next time.
The third feature offers you navigational suggestions. For search terms which relates to specific site, the Google algorithm will translate this and provides suggestions that would direct the users to the specific site if they click the suggestion.
Some suggestions may include ads too, if Google’s targeting software calculates they may be what you are looking for.
This is Google, though, so the company is also running integrated ads into search results. For example: Type in a query for a specific product or company that also happens to be a Google advertiser; the menu will provide its usual suggestions, but the final link will also direct you to the product’s official site.
Finally, the fourth and considerably the most controversial enhancement is Sponsored links in suggestions. “Sometimes we detect that the most relevant completion for what you are typing is an ad,” Google explains. “When an ad is shown, we mark it with the text [sponsored Link] and a highlight it with a colored background, as on the results page.”
In addition to these new sophisticated features, it is even more astonishing to see how they have been optimized both for fast onscreen rendering, and for shortening the amount of time it takes to find what a user is looking for.
The updates will be rolling out starting today.