Google Suggest Denies Support of Non-English Languages But Already Offers It

This week Google will be rolling out to all users its “Google Suggest” functionality that has only been available to opted-in users until now. From now on once you start typing the word you want to search for, you will get a drop-down list of suggestions with the popular search terms along with the number of results you will get for each of them. To generate the suggestions Google identifies the words or phrases you may be looking for based on how popular these search queries are popular among other Google users. With this announcement Google also makes sure everyone understands that it does not retrieve the suggestions based on search history for a user so user’s privacy is protected.

Google explains that this functionality is intended to help users spend less time searching and do it more efficiently now that they will be able to see what search query will be sure to produce results. Besides, it will also eliminate the typos and the hassle involved in clicking the “Did you mean…?” link when the search engine detects the spelling error in your query. The most appealing thing to the majority of users, I believe, is that it will also allow to search with less keystrokes by simply choosing the suggested popular search term right away.

It took Google 4 years to make the feature finally available on the main search page. Until now users of Firefox already enjoyed it when typing the search term in the browser’s search box. Same was true for search operations on Google Labs, Toolbar, Maps, YouTube, iPhone and BlackBerry. Now the company has finally decided the feature is refined enough to be available to everyone right from the Google.com page.

While Google Suggest has also been available for Chinese users for some time, the current announcement is supposed to be only for the English-language search queries and the company does not provide any deadlines (or promises) on when users should expect to see the suggestions in their native languages if different from English or Chinese:

When will you support other languages?

We’re not sure yet. But we’re always interested in expanding our products into more languages, and hope to be able to offer you such services soon!

But strangely I already get suggestions both in English and in Russian when I perform a search on Google.ru (the page I am constantly redirected to when I try to access Google.com no matter how hard I try to persuade Google not to send me there or to any other localized pages it offers to users in Russia). I’m not quite sure how comes they don’t promise support of other languages when it’s already available but it is still good to get the suggestions in Russian as well (let me know in the comments if you are able to get the suggestions in your native language if it’s not English same as I do).

By the way, it is interesting to see that “Google suggest” itself is already the top suggestion for a person who types “google su”, much more popular than “Google Support”, for example. Does that really mean that people don’t even hope for any support from Google now but are incredibly interested in the feature that is only rolling out this week?

What I find the most useful functionality as a person who constantly switches between Latin and Cyrillic keyboard layouts is that Google Suggest can actually understand when I type in Russian a term that is actually supposed to be in English - it really helps a lot since I constantly perform searches on Google for some peculiar combinations of Cyrillic characters and this will eliminate the problem for me. See below an example of the attempted search when I typed the same “google su” in Russian:

There is no denying that many end users will find themselves performing more sophisticated searches now using Google Suggest. But what will be particularly interesting to watch is how SEO experts will try to place the keywords and phrases they may need right there in the first few suggestions to increase the possibility of users doing the search for this particular query where the pages the SEO person tries to promote are ranked well. I am not sure if it will require them making tons of searches from different IPs to show Google that this or that particular phrase is incredibly popular, but I’m sure they won’t leave Google Suggest without attention.