How Google Autocomplete works - Search Engine Land

When you go to the Google homepage, you’ll most likely know what you’re about to type into the search box – whether you’re checking in on the weather forecast, looking for a business or service, or want to find out where you recognize that actor from. (Unless you’re “feeling lucky,” that is.)

You enter a word or a single letter, and Google will populate the search box with a list of “predictions” before you’ve even finished typing. This Google feature is called Autocomplete.

But what exactly is it? How does Google come up with those predictions? Read on to find out how Google Autocomplete works.

What is Google Autocomplete?

Autocomplete is a feature within Google Search that, in Google’s own words, is “designed to make it faster to complete searches that you’re beginning to type.”

Starting as an experimental feature in 2004, it was fully introduced four years later as Google Suggest and was renamed Autocomplete in 2010.

It is available anywhere you can expect to find a Google search box, including:

• The Google home page.
• The Google app for iOS and Android.
• The quick search box from within Android.
• The “Omnibox” address bar within Chrome.

Begin typing, and you’ll see predictions appear.

In the screengrab above, you can see that by typing “new y” Google brings up predictions such as “new york times” or “new york Yankees.”

This makes it easy to finish entering your search on these topics without typing all the letters. The predictions change in real-time in response to each...

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