Bing Improves Search Auto Suggestions: Now Faster & Better

Dan Marantz, Senior Program Manager Lead at Bing announced on the Bing Search Blog that they have made two improvements to the auto-suggestions.

Bing’s auto-suggest is now faster and a lot more accurate, according to Bing. Bing said two “themes” are behind the change including navigational queries coming to the forefront of auto-suggest and search history being more extensively used within auto-suggest.

They sped up the auto-suggest by using a technique called “ghosting” where Bing will show the suggestion in blue highlighted text in the search box and then show alternatives below. You can tab or press the down arrow to access those suggestions and press enter or click to search for that query. Bing said this has sped up user searches by over 16%.

Google obviously uses the technique called Google Instant which actually loads the search results almost immediately as you type. Google launched Instant on September 8, 2010.