Autocomplete Guide and a Quick April Update

Autocomplete has been an important tool for online business owners since the day it was first rolled out. When searching for something, users can and do have Google do their thinking for them. Thinking about a budget? All you have to do is type budget into the search bar and Google's autocomplete points you in a particular direction.

Understanding how Google is making these predictions and what the predictions will be for your keywords is extremely important and at times very complex. The good news it that search engine expert Danny Sullivan has taken on the challenge of analyzing and explaining Google's autocomplete process. For the complete guide to Google's Autocomplete you can check out Danny's article How Google Instants Autocomplete Suggestions Work.

This article provides insight on the history of Autocomplete and explains how they come up with the predictions including:

• The way differences in region and language can affect the predictions.
• How previous searches affect the predictions.
• How the popularity of certain search terms affects the predictions.
• How spelling corrections are dealt with in Autocomplete.
• How "fresh" the search terms are - or how quickly new trending terms are picked up as predictions.

And even more interesting is the thorough discussion on what predictions are removed based on legal cases and Google's protection of certain groups.

Google has made one interesting change since the publishing of Danny's article. In the past when no one had previously searched for a certain term Google would not have any predictions. In order to reduce the number of times this happens Google has started making predictions based on the last couple of words of the search phrase. Google provided the following example: