Today I discovered an interesting bug in Google’s auto-suggest feature which is triggered by incomplete words in long form queries. To recreate the bug search for a long sentence but remove a few last letters of a word and then click into the search box. Here are some examples:
It appears that query segment bolding works in reverse. For example words “a”, “business” and “the” are the only terms contained within my original query, also the only terms not bolded in the suggestions.
It’s interesting that others report completely different suggestions for the same query:
@dejanseo mine had “mark zuckeburg” and “Facebook messenger”
— Robert Ramirez (@ramirez_robert) May 5, 2016
It also happens on mobile devices:
@dejanseo here’s the first screenshot pic.twitter.com/klAppiEwBl
— Robert Ramirez (@ramirez_robert) May 5, 2016
Dan Petrovic, the managing director of DEJAN, is Australia’s best-known name in the field of search engine optimisation. Dan is a web author, innovator and a highly regarded search industry event speaker.
ORCID iD: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6886-3211
Google's Search Console Fails to Canonicalise
