14 DAY TRIAL // Google has announced the launch of Google Suggest as an independent website. The new tool is described as similar to the "Did You Mean?" feature, which offers suggestions in case of a spelling error or when results are not as conclusive as desired.
One of the things that Google Suggest does is directly related to its name - it hints at the best words to make a query. If someone types just a single word in the case, the application will retrieve some other words that, combined with the entry, will give the user better chances of finding what he/she is looking for. Besides the suggested queries, one can see the number of results that have been previously displayed for that specific search. Although cookies must be enabled, the results of new queries don't depend on personal previous ones, the app displaying the most popular results worldwide.
Another good thing about Google Suggest is that it diminishes the number of spelling errors in real time. Thus, although someone may spell "clasical" in the query case, the app will still display, in the drop-down menu, results related to "classical music," "classical gas," "classical guitars," etc. The instant correction of spelling errors reduces the time necessary for the search engine to show an accurate result. Before the new feature was implemented, one had to reenter the query, this time spelled right, and perform the search again, which was much more difficult.
The new tool comes with one of the features that were most reliable in the classic Google - it saves keystrokes, which means that, when pressing the letter "v", for example, the app will display all the queries conducted from that computer that started with "v".
The author of the blog post that announces the public availability of the tool gives a personal example of how Google Suggest was useful to her. "Back when I was planning my wedding, I had a list of wedding songs in mind, but the problem was that I couldn't remember any of the artist names or song titles. So I started typing into the Google search box parts of the lyrics that I did remember -- and like magic, I saw suggestions with the artist name and song titles that I wanted! (I was opted-in to the keyword suggestions Google Labs experiment at the time)." explains Jennifer Liu, product manager at Google.
Google Suggest, which can be set up as a regular homepage, is available here.