Google released a big list of 65 changes it has made over the course of August and September, and quite a few of them were tweaks to its autocomplete feature.
This is all part of Google’s goal of getting you to what you’re looking for more quickly, and with less steps, something the search engine has made tremendous strides on over the years.
The following 10 changes deal specifically with autocomplete:
- #83197. [project “Autocomplete”] This launch introduced changes in the way we generate query predictions for Autocomplete.
- essence. [project “Autocomplete”] This change introduced entity predictions in autocomplete. Now Google will predict not just the string of text you might be looking for, but the actual real-world thing. Clarifying text will appear in the drop-down box to help you disambiguate your search.
- #84259. [project “Autocomplete”] This change tweaked the display of real-world entities in autocomplete to reduce repetitiveness. With this change, we don’t show the entity name (displayed to the right of the dash) when it’s fully contained in the query.
- TSSPC. [project “Spelling”] This change used spelling algorithms to improve the relevance of long-tail autocomplete predictions.
- Dot. [project “Autocomplete”] We improved cursor-aware predictions in Chinese, Japanese and Korean languages. Suppose you’re searching for “restaurants” and then decide you want “Italian restaurants.” With cursor-aware predictions, once you put your cursor back to the beginning of the search box and start typing “I,” the prediction system will make predictions for “Italian,” not completions of “Irestaurants.”
- #84288. [project “Autocomplete”] This change made improvements to show more fresh predictions in autocomplete for Korean.
- espd. [project “Autocomplete”] This change provided entities in autocomplete that are more likely to be relevant to the user’s country. See blog post for background.
- #83391. [project “Answers”] This change internationalized and improved the precision of thesymptoms search feature.
- #82876. [project “Autocomplete”] We updated autocomplete predictions when predicted queries share the same last word.
- #80435. [project “Autocomplete”] This change improves autocomplete predictions based on the user’s Web History (for signed-in users).
Last month, Google Autocomplete stopped excluding the term “bisexual,” attracting some headlines for the feature – probably the most positive headlines the feature has seen in recent memory, given that they didn’t involve Google getting in trouble for making controversial suggestions about specific people.