Google is back with yet another auto-complete change that they are testing… And Google has kicked it up a notch from the test in late March where Google was filling autocomplete with comeptitor’s names. Now they are also including the title of the competitors website as well as the site’s URL.
This autocomplete works similarly to the previous competitor’s names one but instead of being on a Google search result page, a user is on a non-Google webpage instead, and shows results related to that particular site and/or page.
They are also doing something similar for related articles. When a user is on an article and clicks into the address bar, Google suggests related articles to the current article, incase the searcher planned to refine the search.
Yes, some of the sites could be competitors, but from a knowledge point of view, it definitely helps users fine more related content on other sites. But some of those sites might not be so happy about sending their traffic off to other sites, but one could argue that if a searcher is clicking into the browser URL bar, they are probably finished with the current site they are on.
However, not all search queries are resulting in these specialized autocomplete suggestions. Here is a popular search with merely related keywords.
From the previous test Google was running last month, Google was simply autosuggesting competitors names, but without the URLs that some of these new results show. Here is what those results look, like, so the newer version definitely looks better from a user experience perspective.
Dan Shure of Evolving SEO was the first to spot the change and provided TheSEMPost with additional screenshots.
Now this is clever. Google Chrome even suggesting similar articles on a page by page basis in the nav suggest pic.twitter.com/VqLCW3Rr5T
— Dan Shure (@dan_shure) April 2, 2015
Jennifer Slegg
Latest posts by Jennifer Slegg (see all)
- 2022 Update for Google Quality Rater Guidelines – Big YMYL Updates - August 1, 2022
- Google Quality Rater Guidelines: The Low Quality 2021 Update - October 19, 2021
- Rethinking Affiliate Sites With Google’s Product Review Update - April 23, 2021
- New Google Quality Rater Guidelines, Update Adds Emphasis on Needs Met - October 16, 2020
- Google Updates Experiment Statistics for Quality Raters - October 6, 2020
[…] We’ve seen Google suggesting competitor’s names when refining a search term of the brand and its websites as well as suggesting related (and often competitive) website URLs and related article links. […]