The reason a search box changes what people want
Autocomplete offers a finished question before the user has finished asking one. The suggestion is usually accepted, and it was not the original query.
Intuition test — answer before you read on
Users frequently accept an autocomplete suggestion instead of finishing their own query. What is the consequence?
A user types four characters. Six completed queries appear. One of them is close enough to what was intended, and it is selected in preference to finishing the original thought. The search that runs is the platform’s phrasing of the question, not the user’s.
What everyone sees
Autocomplete is experienced as convenience and speed, and it is both. Users describe the suggestions as reading their mind, which is a reasonable description of a system trained on the queries of people like them. The substitution is not noticed because the suggestion resembles the intention closely enough to feel identical.
What is actually happening
Query suggestion narrows the space of asking. Suggestions are drawn from popular past queries, so they systematically favour questions that have already been asked often, and selecting one is faster than typing an unusual phrasing. Research on query reformulation and suggestion bias, including work by Baeza-Yates on search behaviour and by Introna and Nissenbaum on the politics of search, describes the resulting feedback loop: common queries are proposed, proposal makes them commoner, and rare formulations become progressively harder to reach.
Why it stays hidden
The narrowing hides because the accepted suggestion satisfies the user. Whatever the original phrasing would have returned is never seen, so there is no comparison to be disappointed by. The interface also presents suggestions as help rather than as a shortlist, and help is not the kind of thing users audit for what it left out.
Suggestion shapes the question. What is easy to ask becomes what gets asked, and the alternative results are never observed.
Suggestion shapes the question. What is easy to ask becomes what gets asked, and the alternative results are never observed.
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Suggestion shapes the question. What is easy to ask becomes what gets asked, and the alternative results are never observed.
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Sources & further reading 3
- Introna & Nissenbaum, "Shaping the Web: Why the Politics of Search Engines Matters", The Information Society, 2000
- Baeza-Yates, "Bias on the Web", Communications of the ACM, 2018
- Sullivan, "How Google Autocomplete Works in Search", Google, 2018
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