One of the big news items going around today is Google Search Suggest. As you type in your search query in the form field it displays auto complete suggestions along with an estimated number of pages matching the suggested term. I’ve tried this on Safari (Mac OS X), Firefox (Windows) and Internet Explorer (Windows) and all of them seem to work well with this new feature. Looks like the new web rank fight will be not only how high your site shows up in Google search results, but how high up in Google auto complete suggestions your name shows up.
This seems like it will be a handy feature to have, I’d really like to see it in my Google search box in Safari and Firefox also. As Jeremy likes to note, this feature has the now classic Google Beta stamp on it, so who knows if (or when) we will see this on the main Google search page.
Will Yahoo follow with an auto complete feature of their own? Even if they do, and some how do it better than Google does, it still makes Yahoo look a little awkward. I’d like to see Yahoo do something useful, simple and obvious like this first instead of copying Googles good ideas (not that there is anything wrong with that).
Update (9:10pm 10 Dec 2004): Here is the Google Suggest FAQ.