Google Autocomplete, née Google Suggest, the Precursor of Google Instant

With all the brouhaha over the premiere of Google Instant, its easy to over look the fact that Google Instant isn’t really very new. In 2004 Google Labs launched a new tool called Google Suggest. Google suggest provided a list of potential search keyword phrases based on the keystrokes a user typed. Initially Google Suggest also displayed the estimated number of results for a given keyword phrase. Google Suggest was developed by Google engineer Kevin Gibbs in Google’s famous 20% time.

Google Suggest in Action. Note the result counts.

Google adds search results to the search box

Over time Google added functionality to Google suggest, providing links, weather information and even ads within the Google suggest powered search box. With Google Instant, Google has taken the next logical step of providing suggested results under the search box rather than in it. Google Instant needs to be seen as an evolution of Google suggest. Indeed, many of the limits of Google Instant, such as supplying local geographic targeted results for US metro areas only, are really Google Suggest limits.

Google Suggest with Weather and search buttons in Search Box

Google’s Spying on Us – Outcry Coming Soon to a Blog near you!

In September 2008, Google disclosed how Google must spy on your keystrokes in order to display Google Suggest suggestions. A hypothetical user may want to search for “SEO“, but in a moment of distraction, starts typing “SEX”. With Google Suggest (and Google Instant), the cat is out of the bag.

Of the data Google collects on its users, Google says 2% is kept for quality and monitoring purposes. It seems that this 2% is anonymized within 24 hours of capture. It isn’t so clear why this isn’t done immediately, but it is easy to imagine that Google is worried that some SEO professionals will send massive numbers of queries for certain terms in order for those terms to appear in Google Suggest.

Google Suggest Chronology

Date	Milestone
2004-12-10	Google Suggest launches from an idea developed by Kevin Gibbs in his 20% time.
2005-09-22	Google Suggest introduced in the Google Toolbar for Firefox
2007-10-11	Indic transliteration available for Hindi
2008-04-24	Chinese Stock Tickers Available in Google Suggest for Google Finance China
2008-05-06	Indic transliteration available for Kannada, Malayalam, Tamil and Telugu in addition to Hindi
2008-08-25	Google Suggest enabled on Google’s google.com home page for US centric searches (but not yet on Google’s search results page)
2008-09-08	Google discloses how Google must spy on your keystrokes in order to display Google Suggest results.
2008-11-21	Indic transliteration available for 8 languages; Google Suggest available in “many languages”
2009-03-31	Google Suggest goes international, covering 155 domains in 51 languages (just home page)
2009-05-20	Google Suggest enabled on search results pages on Google.com, not just Google start page. Past searches included for logged in users (personalization). Navigational suggestions appear, e.g. direct links to sites. (Straight from Andrei Broder’s 2002 taxonomy of web search). Since someone has to pay for all of this, Google also includes Pay-Per-Click ads from AdWords directly in the Google Suggest enabled search box. Unfortunately, what Google giveth, Google taketh: Google removed the display of result counts, although they were still available behind the scenes until last July. Google Suggest Navigational Suggestion
2009-10-02	Google Suggest on a mobile phone is personalized from desktop searches for logged in users
2009-10-31	Google Suggest on search results pages covering 156 country domains and 52 languages
2009-12-11	Google inserts universal search features in Google Suggest.
2010-04-16	Google suggest results personalized to user’s metro region (based on IP) for US based users
2010-07-17	Google suggest removes result counts in data feeds
2010-10-16	Google renames Google Suggest to Google Autocomplete
2010-10-22	Google Autocomplete, née Google Suggest, now provides locally tailored suggestions world-wide (currently 155 domains)

Influencing (or spamming) Google Suggest

Many companies wonder how they can influence Google Suggest. This becomes an especially hot topic when a reputation management issue is involved. A naive response is to ask a few employees to perform repeat queries for desired keywords. The reality is much more complicated. Google naturally has mechanisms in place to try to detect and discount repeated queries from the same Ips and automated queries in general. In any case, it is important to consider the sheer volume of authentic queries Google has to populate Google Suggest.

A note on Google’s commitment to Innovation

As a side note, investment in innovation such as Google Suggest is one of the key’s to Google’s continued success. While myopic Wall Street impresses itself with Mark Hurd’s R&D cuts at HP and soon, Oracle, companies like Google and Apple woo their customers and keep employees motivated through the continued innovation R&D investment brings. Happy customers and employees lead to impressive results for Wall Street not just next quarter but in 2 years too. Too bad Wall Street only figures this out when “lean” companies no longer have anything new in their pipe line.

Updated 2010-10-19 to note Google’s renaming of Google Suggest to Google Autocomplete. 2010-10-23: added roll-out of locally pertinent suggestions

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