Back in 2004, the first thing Gibbs built on his shuttle trips was a URL predictor. So, as you started typing a URL into a browser, it would autocomplete the remaining options by analyzing Google’s immense corpus of Web content. Kind of like how, in Outlook, when you started typing an email, the names of the people in your address book would pop up — but on a much larger scale.
A co-worker — Gibbs now can’t recall who it was — looked over and said, “That’s cool, what if you did it for search?”
So Gibbs redid the system. It clicked right away. Search leaders at Google, including Jeff Dean and Rob Pike, got wind of the feature and started promoting Gibbs’s work internally. Mayer contributed the name “Google Suggest.”
But before the product could launch, Gibbs had to personally create the blacklist of words that wouldn’t appear on Google Suggest.
Since the feature would be actively showing results before someone had finished a query, there was a huge risk of Google putting forth something that offended people — even if it was the most likely result algorithmically.
- allthingsd.com