Google Tests Enhanced Suggestions

Google's search suggestions are useful, but they're only displayed if many people search for them. If you type a "long tail" query, Google doesn't show suggestions and can't even finish the words you type.

Adam Harris, a reader of this blog, noticed that Google tests an enhanced version of Google Suggest that autocompletes words. For example, if you search for [javascript eval] and you add "conca" to your query, Google doesn't normally show suggestions. The new version of Google Suggest autocompletes the word you started to type and guesses that you wanted to use the word "concatenate".



Note: the first screenshot also shows a feature of a Chrome extension for Evernote.

{ Thanks, Adam. }

Google Video's Strange Disclaimer

Google Video's homepage shows a strange message below the list of query suggestions: "In accordance with local laws and regulations, some results were removed from this list." The message is displayed for every query you enter, so it's unlikely that some of the suggestions are removed.


Update: Google says that "the appearance of the message on every search was in fact a bug and has since been corrected."

Google Filters Suggestions Associated with Copyright Infringement

Google started to filter search suggestions that include terms associated with copyright infringement like "torrent", "bittorrent", "rapidshare", "megaupload". It's a slippery slope and Google's suggestions will be less useful since they'll no longer include many popular searches.

Last month, Google explained that this is one of the changes intended to address copyright infringement. "We will prevent terms that are closely associated with piracy from appearing in Autocomplete. While it's hard to know for sure when search terms are being used to find infringing content, we'll do our best to prevent Autocomplete from displaying the terms most frequently used for that purpose."

Blacklisting keywords like "torrent" is a terrible way to prevent copyright infringement since users can always type queries without Google's help. The main consequence is that Google will appear to be broken and users will no longer trust the suggestions because they're censored. Last year, Google started to become politically correct by removing the suggestions for queries like [why are muslim]. There will always be complaints about the suggestions, but starting to arbitrarily blacklist keywords opens a can of worms and makes it easy to remove other controversial suggestions. As Mashable says, "this is a subtle form of censorship, and at first glance it seems trivial. However, even though the censorship is slight, it still indicates Google's willingness to change its search protocols to satisfy the needs of a certain business group, in this case members of the entertainment industry."

Google doesn't blacklist "pirate bay", "isohunt", "mediafire", "cracks", "serial numbers", "keygen" and there's a simple trick to bypass the existing filters: start your queries using the blacklisted keywords (for example: [torrent ubuntu 10.10]).

Google Suggest Venn Diagrams

Google Suggest Venn Diagram Generator is a visualization tool for popular Google searches. Enter an incomplete query, replace one of the keywords with "X", add three options for "X" and the tool will find the overlapping suggestions.

For example, if you enter "How can I get my X to", where "X" is: "wife", "cat", "dog", you'll find overlapping suggestions like: "How can I get my {wife, cat, dog} to lose weight", "How can I get my {cat, dog} to gain weight".


Hacker News readers came up with a lot of funny examples:

* Why is {America, Canada, Europe} so ...
* My {friend, wife, husband} is addicted to ...
* Why are {Chinese, Korean, Japanese} so ...
* Why is {C, PHP, Java} so ...

You should keep in mind that Google's suggestions are determined algorithmically based on the popularity of the search terms, so you'll find many stereotypes.

Web History Suggestions in Google Instant

There are many missing features in Google Instant. The classic interface suggested searches from the Web History, so you could select previously typed queries.

It seems that this feature will be available again. Google tests a version of Google Instant with Web History suggestions. For some queries, 3 of the 4 suggestions are from the Web History and there's only one general suggestion.


Maybe it would be a better idea to only show one or two personalized suggestions, since they aren't always useful.