The BBC released, what seems like an informal study, on Google's autocomplete suggestions across the world.
In short, they published a document that looked at the autocompletes for A-Z for the Google regional search engines in Britain, the US, India, Hong Kong and Nigeria. The results are suppose to shed some light on perception, popularity and so forth in those specific countries. But does it work?
I spoke with this reporter before he published this and I told him, there is a lot that goes into Google's autocomplete. There is also personalization, user preferences, user past search history, obviously geographic location and much more. So despite you seeing specific autocompletes, someone else in the same location may very well get a different autocomplete for the same letter.
That is indeed the case, after looking at WebmasterWorld thread and also comparing some of the responses myself. What I see as being autocompletes in the US are not all the same as the BBC reported.
Either way, what the BBC is doing isn't new. SEOs use it every day for keyword research. But clearly, the mainstream is learning.
Forum discussion at t WebmasterWorld.
