April 8, 2009 by Matt Thomas
If you’ve used Google recently you may have noticed a new feature in the search bar. As you type in a query, the Google search bar will now attempt to guess what you are looking for, not based on your previous searches as was the arrangement before but on what Google calls complex popularity algorithms.
The upshot is that when you begin to type something in, Google will now offer you a list of suggestions for what you might be typing to save on keystrokes, these suggestions will also show the number of results in green on the far right hand side. It’s all very impressive, no doubt, but is it actually an improvement?
For me, it might just be a case of over engineering, a very fancy, technical way of making things a bit more difficult rather than easier, since people tend to repeat searches a lot.
Let me explain what I mean. If you’re in the pet care business you’re going to want to do a lot of pet related searches. Under the old system, if you typed in ‘pet’, you’d get all your former searches up for you to pick from, you could then return to one or modify one slightly with only minimal typing. Now your suggestions would include, ‘Peter Jones,’ ‘petrol insurance,’ and ‘PETA.’ Not quite as useful maybe Google?
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