Google Suggest has graduated

While I still haven’t, Google Suggest has graduated and is live at Google.com. Google Suggest is the “type ahead search keyword suggestion” which had been lying at Google Labs for a long time.

Please note that I could see Google Suggest working at www.google.com and not at www.google.co.in (as of this writing). May be it will come to the latter a little later.

If you are browsing from India and you type in www.google.com you are redirected to www.google.co.in. To go to www.google.com click on the link “Go to Google.com” (found on the bottom right, below the search text box).

Once you are at google.com, try typing “open s” technology and you would get suggestions like “open source”, “open source software”, “open suse” etc. along with the number of Google search results these keywords may yield. Saves you from typing and misspells!

Google Suggest gives a type ahead suggestion for known (or well known keywords) along with the search results. That is, typing in shekhar Suggests “shekhar kapur” (famous movie director), “shekhar suman” (TV celebrity) and others but does not Suggest “shekhar govindarajan” (grrrrrr).

Google Suggest (though not at google.co.in) is live @:

• www.google.co.jp
• www.google.fr

Other titbits

• As of this writing. Google Suggest is also not implemented at http://www.google.com.pk/ (Google Pakistan). Its not available for Google Australia and Google UK too, so definitely not a third world treatment.
• The Google Suggest only works on the first page (e.g. www.google.com). When you search again using the search box on search results page, its the same old, “non type-ahead typing-in”. I wonder why?  I’m used to firing a completely different search/keywords based on the results fetched from the first (or subsequent) searches. Perhaps, a type ahead search could be nuisance if implemented across? But let the user decide this via options/preferences (see below)
• Noticed a new option named “Query Suggestions” in Preferences (link on the right side to the search box). This can be used to turn the Google Suggest on or off. But this again works only for the first page (as said above).