They pose an entirely new quality problem for Google, hence my name "problematic searches". Problematic searches aren't new, but generally haven't been a big deal due to their rarity. In an interview last week, Pandu Nayak – a Google Fellow who works on search quality – spoke about this: “It turns out to be a very small issue, a fraction of our query flow. So it doesn't show up very often or almost never in our regular ratings and so on. And we see these problems. It looks like a small problem,”
Nayak said. But in recent months they have become a major public relations nightmare for the company. My story from earlier this month, An In-Depth Look at Google's Biggest Search Quality Crisis, provides more insight into this. All attention has registered jewelry retouching service with Google. “People [at Google] were really shocked by all of this. This, although it was a small issue [in terms of number of searches], it became clear to us that we really needed to fix it. It was a big issue, and it's an issue we didn't appreciate before,”
Nayak said. Suffice it to say that Google appreciates the issue now. Hence today's news, to highlight that she is taking concrete actions that she hopes will bring about meaningful change. Improved autocomplete search suggestions The first of these changes concerns "automatic completion". This is when Google suggests topics to search for when someone starts typing into a search box. It was designed to be a way to speed up research. Someone typing 'wea' probably means searching for 'weather'.
