14 DAY TRIAL // Google has decided to let the world join in and lend a helping hand with feedback for its various user experience improving programs. Today, it's about the auto-complete option that one and all can turn on for the search engine's homepage.
All you need to do for this to happen is to visit the Experimental Search homepage and click on the "Join this experiment" button right next to the "Keyword suggestions" section. Auto complete will then be switched on and you will see the search box expand to a list of popular queries as you type.
Useful, I know, not unique, rather behind on time, but welcome nonetheless. Some countries have this option by default, such as China; but users in many other countries will have to go through the above process in order to see its "beneficial" effects. For example, Yahoo! has recently gone the same path and launched its very own auto-complete feature, but it looks so much neater than what Google is offering right now. It has a special box divided in half, for the queries formed with the letters typed in and the second for a potential future word that matches a previous query. It also doesn't stress you right away with the drop-down list, but it waits for you to pause for a couple of moments in typing and only then it does its thing.
I've just joined this experiment and the one thing it has more than Yahoo!'s equivalent of it is the number of matches it finds, displayed in the right. That's something like Google Trends, if I may compare the two. A good tool to have at your disposal when you have to type in complicated words or names (especially Nordic ones, I find those rather difficult), or when you're in a hurry. Except for that? eh? what can I say, it might as well not have been there as far as I'm concerned.