Google Adds “Real-Time” Suggestions to Google News

Google has added its Google Suggest feature to Google News in its English, French, Italian, German, and Spanish versions. Now when you go to search for something on Google News, Google will attempt to guess what you may be searching for.

"The feature can make your experience searching Google News better by helping you formulate queries, saving you keystrokes, correcting spelling mistakes and exposing you to queries you might not have thought of," says Google. "The goal of all that? To get you to the articles you’re looking for as quickly as possible."

Google brought Google Suggest to Google.com last year. Earlier this year in went worldwide. Google even began placing ads within the suggestions. This was one feature introduced a few months ago along with some navigational suggestions, personalized suggestions, and suggestions on results pages.

It is unclear how many of these features will be present in the Google News version of Google Suggest, but it is interesting that Google refers to these suggestions as being "real time." This is not exactly the real-time search that we are familiar with, as those offered by Twitter, Facebook, and others, but the Google News suggestions seem to indicate that they are reflections of timely news searches.

It does a reasonably good job at this. When starting to type a query for "Ted," I was expecting Ted Kennedy to come up first (ideally), but Teddy Bruschi came up first, and since he just announced his retirement, it appears to have exceeded my expectations in that regard.Typing "Sk" at the moment brings up "Skype" as the first result. The eBay-Skype deal was just announced, so it seems to be working pretty well.