Google explains how Autocomplete, Search features work

Early last year, Google hired a “public liaison of search” to help clarify how its flagship product works. The latest in this Search explainer series discusses what appears in Featured Snippets, the Knowledge Graph, and Autocomplete.

Those three features work differently from organic Search listings and rankings, or the blue links. Google has different policies in place as they highlight information more prominently and “show up when you haven’t explicitly asked for them.” Depending on the query, the search engine will “correct information or remove those features.”

Predictive features in Google Search include Related Searches and Autocomplete. The latter in recent weeks has been subject to some criticism for not showing certain terms that some groups feel are obvious, with that subset equating it to bias by Google.

At a high-level, Google explains that it will not show Autocomplete predictions that “might be shocking or offensive or could have a negative impact on groups or individuals.” This policy applies to violence, gore, profanity, hate, and several other areas.

You can still issue any search you’d like, but we won’t necessarily show all possible predictions for common searches. If no predictions appear or if you’re expecting to see a related search and it’s not there, it might be that our algorithms have detected that it contains potentially policy-violating content, the prediction has been reported and found to violate our…

Read more…