Suggest works by throwing up popular search terms that start with the letters entered, and which alters the suggestions as you type and the keyword becomes ever more defined. The idea is to either anticipate the user's search term, so that they need not type their whole keyword or, as the name of the technology implies, suggest an alternate or more accurate search term to the user.
The Google Suggest technology has raised the interest of inquiring search engine marketers as the functionality of the tool could well have knock on effects for search engine optimisation. Following keyword trends over the years, as bigmouthmedia has done, indicates that the use of one word search terms is in decline and technologies such as the Suggest tool from Google will only work to hasten that decline. Running a few searches for different terms reinforces this feeling, as it is rare that the top suggest terms are single words.
Running a search starting with 'a' throws up the following:
While the world cup gets plenty of coverage for 'wo':
The terms suggested in Google News and those thrown up in the plain vanilla Google Suggest are divergent, with slight overlaps for highly popular search terms such as 'World of Warcraft', implying that the work done by Mr McAlister improves the relevancy of the suggested search term based on recent searches as well as overall search figures.
Long-term implications such as the possibility that search behaviours such as one word searching are going to be further impacted with the adoption of this search technology are potentially going to be overshadowed by the risk of embarrassment, and legal action, by throwing in x-rated search terms to a user without prompting.
The use of strict safe search filtering on Google Suggest works fine, however the Suggest tool in Google News seems to still throw up some startling suggestions if your keyword starts with 'fuc' - poor old Tom Cruise...
It's always problematic looking into the search engine optimisation crystal ball, however even this cursory glance over the suggest tool provides plenty of food for thought. Advertisers using Google AdWords might do well to analyse any predictions they may have made on traffic figures for the 'long tail' of search terms, as the reduction of single-word search terms could well be mirrored in a reduction of four and five word search terms as Suggest drags our queries into the middle ground.
As ever, it's a case of watch this (query field) space.
