Google Suggest

I first saw Google Suggest no later than 2005 I’m sure. I was stunned just couldn’t believe my eyes. Google is able to auto-complete my query suggesting from the top results, and that was all happening on the fly. No other search engine could do it at that time. At least not to my knowledge. The service was in Google Labs back then and is still as we stand now. I wonder why all this time to make it the default search. I figured back then it must be for testing and to avoid massive extra load on the system, but by now the service should be ready for full launch. I know Firefox Google Search Plugin does come with auto-completion, but that’s not enough. You know why?

Yesterday only a friend of mine told me “Hey Bashar!, have you seen Yahoo’s new search?. They can auto-complete your query on the fly!”. Ahh, that’s old news I told him. Google has it from long time. He didn’t believe ofcourse they have the same service. He thought I am talking about stored history queries in my browser. When I showed it to him he was kind of surprised. This makes me wonder why does it take Google that long to get such brilliant service out from the labs and to the public. They are just coming with the ideas now and letting Yahoo enjoy the public reputation, when actually Yahoo are just cloning it. Even now, Google Suggest is still better as I see it. Yahoo one looks more compelling that’s true. But it’s only available from Yahoo main page search, not when you go to Yahoo Search results page, that’s for one. Another thing is the relevancy of the search. Take a look at the query result below from Yahoo and see how Google treated it as shown above. When I search for “pla”, 6 years old kid would shot “Y STATION!”, which is what we see from Google results. Yahoo on the other hand has shorter list of suggestions and misses one of the most obvious queries. This is just a quick dummy test ofcourse, but all in all, Google Suggest is capable of delivering more suggestions than Yahoo.

Yahoo Suggest

Now, go to the Google Labs to see list of services that have been in there for quite some time and people are still unaware of, like the Google Ride Finder for instance. How many people know they can track Taxis online in the US? This was also available back in 2005 and up till now. Sad thing is, some of those services gets killed while still in the labs, like the Google API.

UPDATE: To the people who like the feature, try AllTheWeb Livesearch Beta from Yahoo!. It’s like the Google Labs but to be honest, I love it. I just don’t understand how the sponsored results at the top are separated from normal results. I don’t see separator or anything.

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