It took a certain search giant about four years to release Google Suggest to the public, which, considering the feature’s simplicity, is a rather ridiculous amount of time.  Only now that Google Suggest’s out, complaints are starting to pile up, and some people are wishing the feature had been held back even longer.

Google Suggest is the thing that tries to autocomplete all queries.  Moreover, it recommends correct spellings when the searchers goof, and shows about how many results there will be for any given phrase.

One problem with this is the clutter that’s introduced; people who know what they’re searching for don’t need dropdown menus and a bunch of numbers to appear and self-revise.

As for the other (probably more important) stuff, Tamar Weinberg mentions “the negative impact to long tail searches, more traffic to regional sites, and less opportunity to capitalize on misspellings . . .”

She later continues, “Martin Bowling explains that Google Suggest is a reputation management nightmare.  Using an illustration for Obama, one sees that a lot of ‘common’ searches include ‘obama antichrist’ and ‘obama muslim,’ search phrases you wouldn’t think of . . . .  This can eventually grow over time and the reputation management dangers could increase.”

Businesses and individual bloggers will want to run some test searches with Google Suggest to see how they’ve been affected.  (The feature can then be disabled through the “preferences” menu if you don’t like it.)  Here’s hoping all the recommendations point your would-be customers and readers in the right direction.

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