Let Google Suggest Your Next Search

By Marisa Peacock | Published Aug 28, 2008

The semantic web grows ever nearer. Soon everything we think will be organized, categorized and analyzed by Google.

Speaking of which, Google will begin to officially release Google Suggest in the next week. Google Suggest is exactly what it sounds like — a tool that works to better understand you, as a user and what you search for. Often, due to misspellings and other limitations of our human brains, our searches can bring up results that don't exactly match what we want. Google Suggest aims to help users better formulate queries, reduce spelling errors and save keystrokes.

Created in Google Labs, their playground for new technology, Google Suggest has been available since 2004. However, it is now an official graduate available on Google.com and will replace the need for the “did you mean?” feature.

It uses information about the relative popularity of common user searches to rank its suggestions, Suggest doesn't formulate its suggestions based off of personal searches (as that would violate the terms of Google's privacy policy). Instead, it starts searching for likely query terms a person is entering before they finish typing the words.

Suggestions listed also show the number of Google results that match that suggestion. By automatically correcting typos and misspelled words ahead of time, Google Suggest hopes to save users' time by eliminating keystrokes.

Google Suggest competes with the likes of Yahoo's Search Assist, which debuted back in October, as well as a handful of other cutting edge semantic web search engines.

To use Google Suggest, users must use Internet Explorer 6.0 (or newer), Netscape 7.1 (or newer), Mozilla 1.4 (or newer), Firefox 0.8 (or newer), Opera 7.54 (or newer) or Safari 1.2.2 (or newer) and have JavaScript and cookies enabled.