Googles Localizes Suggest & Autocorrect
Google has further improved on its search features with two new tweaks on its search box that focus on the company’s localization efforts, revealed the search engine giant on their official blog, adding that these new enhancements are aimed to help users input search queries quickly and easily.
Google Suggest allows localized search queries by country and delivered popular searches tailored for different regions and as such, it provides localized search query suggestions specific to the user’s country. However, this time the feature has gone and furthered localization to provide a more refined set of search queries for different parts of the same country. As such, based on the user’s city, the search result would vary to generate relevant suggestions.
“Last year we launched localized Google Suggest by country, offering relevant popular search queries tailored for different regions. However, just as people in the UK often look for different things than people in US, we’ve found that people in Seattle tend to look for different things than people in Dallas.”
As you can see from the suggested search terms on the screenshot below, the entered query “bart” would have yielded the TV animated character Bart Simpson in probably most cities, but in San Francisco, BART is an acronym for Bay Area Rapid Transit and thus showed the results accordingly.
Likewise, when the search was conducted in Chicago, entering the search term “bull” came up with a list of strings relating to their local NBA team.
Localization has always been a big part in Google’s strategy, aiming to widen its global reach and cater to more people across its properties. In addition to Google Suggest’s tweaks, Google expanded its auto-correct feature and is now available in 31 languages. Moreover, the company also announced that it has polished its spelling corrections for frequently misspelled proper names, a feature now available in the US and will eventually be rolled out to other parts of the world and other languages within the next few months.
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RSpears @ April 18, 2010
