A new tool from Google came out in the last week or so, and it has been making the rounds in the blogosphere. I haven’t posted about the new Google Suggest, mainly because I think it’s a rather dumb idea. Basically it is a search box with something similar to Microsoft’s IntelliSense – you start typing letters and it suggests words and phrases you might be beginning to type.
Mainly I think it’s a dumb idea because it does what a directory does, but in a much less intuitive way. If I want to browse web pages, I’ll use a directory thank you. If I want to search, I will type the keywords for what I am searching, and I don’t need help typing them. Randomly typing in letters won’t make my searching or browsing any more productive, it’s as simple as that. I fail to see who Google Suggest is for, or how it is useful.
I was catching up on blogs tonight, and came across this post from Eric Rice. Take a look at what Google Suggest is doing to him. I now have a new reason to dislike the tool. And Eric, if you read this, I sincerely hope you can get something worked out. That’s just not cool, and I would imagine many other individuals and organizations will have similar problems.
MasterMaq's Blog 
My cynical side thinks is another revenue stream – i.e. a company pays to have a suggestion added that will bring up pages that it appears on or has adwords or banner ads on.
And on the Eric front – let’s duck while the lawsuits commence.
I always find it interesting when a company has had so much success like google search engine, gmail, google images, but then makes one they’ll still make ginormous mistakes…
exposed inge…lol.
I noticed that google suggest does not show same number of results as google.com itself:
http://www.nirendra.net/cms/google/suggest
-Nirendra Awasthi
I can understand you (and I) being dumb enough not to come with something as *simple* as Google Suggest. But I for can stand out from you – because you’re the kind of dumbness which does not *get* it even after the solution (or product) in this case is handed to you. You must have been the guy at the block who read instructions to build Lego and said, "Wow! What an accomplishment!"
Here is a walkthrough for Google Suggest: It prompts you depending upon what is the most popular search for the part ph phrase as you type it. The seach may for all you know be completely random and useless – as in many cases that you can imagine.
But consider this – you are tyring to find out a model number for a well know product recall by Apple. What you do is start typing the model number (whatever you can remember of it) and progress from it as Google Suggest start giving you "clues."
Another example, lets say you have a problem with Outlook. If it’s a fairly well documented problem, then google suggest will start prompting you with what other people have been searching. Obviously what it suggests you with are more likely to give you the results you are looking for. This way you can fine tune your own searches for the engine based on what others have also been searching – not to mention it also gives you an idea of how many other people are experiencing the same problem.
Man… I hope you *get* it know, before you start advertising your Dvorak side. Try google suggest if you don’t know him.