Google has made a number of improvements over the past several years designed to broaden the scope of its market-leading search engine. Like its main competitors, Google has, for example, added image and video results and connected more tightly to social networks like Twitter and Facebook.
The latest improvements qualify more as tweaks than anything major, but as ecommerce-guide reports, Google’s new features can speed delivery of relevant results.
Google has pushed out
that reflect both innovation and, in at least one case, represents a response to rival Bing.
The news is key for industry watchers, search marketers and users of the world’s most popular search engine, which is working to not just safeguard its massive hold on users and ad dollars by enhancing its appeal, but to stave off competition from players like Microsoft’s Bing.
Several new Google improvements aim to make it easier for users to find what they seem to be seeking. That’s the case with an enhancement to Google Suggest, the feature that gives a best guess for a search term so that a query can be entered at a click without typing in the full word or phrase.
For example, as you enter the letters, B, A, R, A… in the search box, a drop-down menu suggests a list of popular related search terms starting with “Barack Obama”. Yahoo (NASDAQ: YHOO), Bing and other search engines have a similar feature.