The man who suggested Google autosuggest

Sitting on a shuttle to Google’s Mountain View campus, employee Kevin Gibbs began work on a project that would change how we searched the web. Using Google’s billions of search results, he created a tool that would predict what people were searching for and brought the text up automatically. He wanted to call it “Google Complete,” but Marissa Mayer coined the final name: Google Suggest. All Things D talks to Gibbs about the history of what’s now called autosuggest, which has gone from a simple convenience to a legal nightmare to a source of poetry from the internet’s hive mind.