Google Suggest

Google Labs just released Google Suggest, a little tool that tries to guess your search query as you type it in.

It appears to be a simple UI layer over their spelling correction feature. No real query refinement, no clustering to offer suggestions of different terms (synonyms, related topics).

A cute toy, but I don't see anything really interesting here.

[via Nathan Weinberg and Danny Sullivan]

Update: Chris DiBona points to the ABC's of Google Suggest. Cute.

Update: Okay, I take it back. Looking at this more, I'm impressed, not with the data, but with the UI. Google is using some clever Javascript tricks (you can see in the code at http://google.com/ac.js) to constantly talk back to the server and retrieve data about how to expand your search string.

Neat-o-jet. Like GMail, this is a remarkable use of Javascript to create a simple, clean, functional UI within the web browser.

Update: Kevin Gibbs talks about Google Suggest on the Google Blog. It's another 20% free time project. Cool.

Update: Chris Justus reverse engineers the Javascript for the Google Suggest UI in a detailed post. Very interesting and worth reading.

Update: A clever knock-off of Google Suggest does the same nifty UI for lookups in a dictionary. Nice work.

Update: And a nifty version of the suggest UI for CPAN (a Perl module archive). [via Joseph Scott]