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You are here: Home / Google / Google Filling Autocomplete in Google Search With Competitor’s Names

Google Filling Autocomplete in Google Search With Competitor’s Names

March 17, 2015 at 5:07 am PST By Jennifer Slegg

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autocomplete competitors headerAre you a well-known brand? Well when a searcher types in your brand name into the Google search box, Google Instant will auto suggest your competitor’s names as well.

For example, if you search for Macy’s, but don’t quite hit enter right away, Google will auto suggest eight different competitors to Macy’s. It does not show a single option related to Macy’s that you would think would come up, such as specific Macy’s departments, locations, or sales information.

autocomplete competitors

This doesn’t seem to be quite as impactful for some other brand queries as the above. For example, Dan Shure was the one who noticed this over the weekend, but his sample search for Zappos only brought up three competitors while the remaining rows auto suggest results were all specifically Zappos related.

autocomplete competitors2

While some searchers do search for company names for the purpose of finding other similar businesses, you would have to think that those searching for something on business’ website would be significantly higher.  Which of course raises the question, is having competitor’s names in the autocomplete a better user experience?

The autocomplete with competitors names was only showing after an initial search was done, so Google was displaying it when you would click back into the search field to either refine the search or do a fresh search.  When you do the initial search without it being refined, it does show the usual autocomplete you’d expect to see.  So Google is banking on the fact users couldn’t find what they were looking for with the first brand search and is instead offering up competitors when someone might just refine the original search instead.

For sake of argument, here is how Bing’s auto-complete looks for the same search term.

autocomplete competitors bingThis strikes me as having the better autocomplete suggestions.

Google’s autocomplete is done algorithmically, based on both predictions and things like spelling corrections and repeat searches.  They do allow users to report offensive autocomplete predictions, however, this particular autocomplete isn’t really offensive to users – except maybe those at the companies that are seeing this for their company brand.

And while there are some tricks that marketers can use to influence auto suggest, it’s not very practical on a wide scale, especially if Google is pulling competitors names to display instead of ones related to the company being search for.

Will this be around to stay?  Hard to say, especially as Google is constantly changing algorithms.

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Jennifer Slegg

Founder & Editor at The SEM Post
Jennifer Slegg is a longtime speaker and expert in search engine marketing, working in the industry for almost 20 years. When she isn't sitting at her desk writing and working, she can be found grabbing a latte at her local Starbucks or planning her next trip to Disneyland. She regularly speaks at Pubcon, SMX, State of Search, Brighton SEO and more, and has been presenting at conferences for over a decade.
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Latest posts by Jennifer Slegg (see all)

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Comments

  1. Dan Shure says

    March 17, 2015 at 5:16 am

    I was wondering when someone was going to write about this 🙂 I put a whole bunch of screenshots and examples here! http://www.evolvingseo.com/2015/03/16/google-related-searches-in-autocomplete/

    I wanted to note that I am only getting these alternative suggestions after hitting enter, and only on some Google accounts of mine (for example, my main Google account never shows the competitors in autocomplete)

    • Jennifer Slegg says

      March 17, 2015 at 5:18 am

      That’s right, I meant to add that, I did my screenshots last night.

  2. Max Peters says

    March 17, 2015 at 6:30 pm

    I don’t seem to be getting results for competitors in the autosuggest, although im based in Thailand.

    I do however get a link at the bottom going straight to the sites: http://i.imgur.com/vsMQRnL.png

    • Jennifer Slegg says

      March 18, 2015 at 4:55 am

      They have done this for a few years now – there can actually be AdWords ads appear there as well.

  3. Eli says

    March 17, 2015 at 11:23 pm

    Pretty interesting discovery. Try doing the doing the search for Macy’s and then clicking on one of the others like Macy’s Promo. When I did this, my next suggest for Macys was promo related terms like “Macys credit card, Macys Flyer”.

    Google seems trying to understand WHY you bounced and then showing you results that might match your intent. You didn’t like Macys? How about Target?

    When I played around with Suggest for this blog post: http://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-suggest-now-smarter-sometimes/125115/. I found Google suggesting geographic “competitors” for schools once you had already clicked on a specific university.

Trackbacks

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    March 19, 2015 at 4:40 am

    […] They are currently not victims of the Brand Autocomplete Competitors popping up in the drop-down […]

  3. Google Filling Autocomplete with Competitors & Related Articles, Complete with URLs - The SEM Post says:
    April 2, 2015 at 5:05 am

    […] that they are testing… And Google has kicked it up a notch from the test in late March where Google was filling autocomplete with comeptitor’s names.  Now they are also including the title of the competitors website as well as the site’s […]

  4. Google Now Autocompletes Popular Brands for Non-Brand Searches - The SEM Post says:
    April 13, 2015 at 4:33 am

    […] seen Google suggesting competitor’s names when refining a search term of the brand and its websites as well as suggesting related (and often competitive) website URLs and related […]

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