October 7, 2007 and August 25, 2008 are dates that will likely be heralded as landmark achievements in user experience, yet live in infamy for our online independence. That is when Yahoo publicly launched Search Assist and Google Suggest graduated from Labs to the Google homepage. Suddenly search engines began finishing our sentences — or at least our keyword queries.
Web browsers had already begun implementing auto fill features to assist users with entering the same data in forms over and over. And so from a product manager perspective, the auto complete feature applied to a search engine makes complete sense. Indeed, the original Google Suggest remains a very useful research tool and has even been the subject of a few short studies. People don’t always know what they are looking for, and who better to ask for suggestions than like-minded searchers around the world?
It is also in the best interests of search engines to promote this feature heavily. Trim the long tail of queries to get eyeballs all on the same phrases and that will force advertisers to bid higher on a smaller set of keywords. Reduce the number of unique queries being searched upon and you speed up response time.
However, I think it is a mistake to enable it by default for everyone. Why?
