Google Autocomplete Gets Enhanced Predictive Powers
Google just announced an update to its autocomplete feature, which speeds up the search process by showing predicted searches while you type. Until now, Google mostly based its predictions by looking at the most popular searches. The problem with this, Google points out, is that the majority of search queries have never been typed in before and hence didn’t show any predictions. Now, however, Google is expanding this feature by “improving the predictive powers of autocomplete” for these seldom used queries as well by just looking at the last part of the query.
By just focusing on the last part of the query, this is obviously not as helpful as autocompleting longer queries, but will likely save users some time in the long run.
Google is rolling this new feature out today on google.com in English and will expand it to other languages and locales over time.