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The suggestions that are diplayed when you type a Google search query are useful most of the time. Google tries to finish your query and suggests some popular queries that start with the keywords you've typed.

Sometimes Google also shows suggestions from web pages and many of them are pretty long and verbose. They look artificial because it's unlikely that many users typed them. Google compiles a list of popular n-grams from web pages and includes them in the list of Google Instant suggestions. You'll find page titles, excerpts from Wikipedia articles and press releases, but also incomplete suggestions that don't make any sense.

It's easy to spot these artificial suggestions: type a long query until Google no longer shows suggestions, type more keywords and Google will suddenly show long suggestions.

Here are some of them:









In the last example I've searched for ["the * why it's inaccurate"] and started to type a new word after "the", when I saw these absurdly detailed suggestions. If you search for [why would it be inaccurate], Google shows a single suggestion: [why would it be inaccurate to speak of an nacl molecule]. You need to type [why would it be inaccurate to call t] to see this suggestion: [why would it be inaccurate to call the pituitary gland the master gland of the body]. This long phrase can't be found in any web page, but it shows up because Google merges various word sequences.

Google Instant suggestions used to only include popular queries. Last year, Google started to show dynamic suggestions for the last words of your query. Now Google's suggestions seem to include excerpts from web pages.

For example, when you search for [intel solid state drive toolbox], Google's list includes two strange suggestions: [intel solid state drive toolbox(intel ssd toolbox)] and [intel® solid-state drive toolbox download]. It's really unlikely that many people search for [intel®] or include redundant versions of the query.


The real explanation is that a lot of pages include those texts and Google used them to enhance Google Instant.


What about the standard navigation links used by Google or Bing? Obviously, they're included in a lot of pages and few Google users would search for boilerplate text and also use special characters.



Google's help center page for autocomplete informs users that "Google's algorithm predicts and displays search queries based on other users' search activities and the contents of web pages indexed by Google".