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.
The man who suggested Google autosuggest
is a senior tech and policy editor focused on online platforms and free expression. Adi has covered virtual and augmented reality, the history of computing, and more for The Verge since 2011.
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