...convenient and relevant for people who arent sure what theyre looking for, people who have trouble spelling and everyone in between.

Its fun seeing the numbers next to the results; I think this feature will be rather handy for those of us interested in keyword relevancy and results. Generally it looks like Google suggests the most popular results for a given query with numbers of searches for each one. Makes a nice information shortcut if youre crunching time or want to get a general idea of how popular a keyword is.

Granted, the moment I saw the feature, I thought about it more in terms of helpful keyword research than user convenience, which I think anyone in the SEO/SEM/SMM field will be prone to do.

However, Im not sure how useful the feature actually is for the average user. Ask has had a similar feature for several years now, and Yahoo has its own search assist in place, and neither has seen much growth from it (check out comscore.com for the numbers).

According to Google product manager Jennifer Liu:

Back when I was planning my wedding, I had a list of wedding songs in mind, but the problem was that I couldnt remember any of the artist names or song titles. So I started typing into the Google search box parts of the lyrics that I did remember " and like magic, I saw suggestions with the artist name and song titles that I wanted! (I was opted-in to the keyword suggestions Google Labs experiment at the time). At that moment, I was so proud to be working on Google Suggest, a search feature that provides real-time suggestions while you search.

While I can see where this would be helpful, I dont think its going to make a huge difference in the way most users search. I think this helps people, but it doesnt fully address the problem of giving users truly relevant results. I did some searching of my own with random words, but several times I didnt find what I was looking for in the suggested terms list.

So it remains to be seen how useful this feature will truly be, but well find out soon enough. For now, Im still intrigued by its quick and dirty keyword research opportunities.

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