Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) has announced its latest weapon in the search engine wars: Google Suggest. It's not mad (rocket) science, of course, but it's currently bubbling away in Google Labs, one of Google's claims to fame.
Google Suggest is a simple concept -- when you start typing in the search box, Google will generate a drop-down box that tries to guess what it is you're searching for. As I was saying before, it's not exactly rocket science. After all, browsers often try to guess where you're going, often rightly, and many email clients do the same.
However, this will make Google search even more intuitive, as it apparently culls results from the power of the masses (i.e., it bases its guesses on popular Web searches).
Although I recently recounted the many ways in which Google has been at the forefront of innovation, given the recent attention on the business of search, it seems that it might become more and more difficult to keep ahead of the pack.
With this particular new feature, it's probably only a matter of time before archrivals Yahoo! (Nasdaq: YHOO), Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT), Ask Jeeves (Nasdaq: ASKJ), and Motley Fool Stock Advisor pick Amazon.com's (Nasdaq: AMZN) A9.com have similar features, if it seems useful enough to Internet users.
Although I will say I lived just fine without Google Suggest, having just now performed some off-the-cuff searches to test it, I'd say it did a darn good job of pinpointing what I was looking for in its drop-down lists.
Given Google shares' recent heights, many have seen perfectly good reason for negativity -- after all, Google has often been successfully copied in its new initiatives. (Speaking of copy-cattiness, MSN is answering Google Desktop Search by launching its desktop search tool in beta this afternoon. Yahoo! said last week that it plans desktop search in January, while Ask Jeeves plan to release its version this month.)
However, this latest innovation shows that Google Labs -- where many new initiatives, such as Google Scholar, reside while they're being perfected -- is an important aspect of Google's existence and leadership in search. After all, Google encourages its employees to spend a percentage of their time dreaming and creating for the future.
Google's suggestive new feature is nothing for investors to get too terribly excited about, for the moment -- it's just another angle to help make Google as sticky as possible, and that's what Google investors expect the company to do. However, given the feature's usefulness and accuracy, it's definitely a good example of why so many people were excited about Google in the first place.
Talk about Google's future -- and the future of search -- on our Google discussion board.
Alyce Lomax does not own shares of any of the companies mentioned.
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