Gagundathar may be right. There seems to be be something insidiously deceptive about autocomplete.
Look at the Google’s own propaganda to promote Chrome’s design features at the time of initial release:
If the storyline is to be believed - Google’s own engineers disliked the autocomplete UI - and then promptly learned that when you disagree with your employer’s business plan, your punishment is to become the official spokesperson for it.
Consider also Chrome’s privacy policy:
They ascribe in-line predictions to “Chrome Instant” without mentioning “autocomplete,” however they do say that “Search results are requested as you type in the address bar, so the text you type may be logged as search terms.”
I suspect this means that Google’s autocomplete allows them a clever way to drive up charges to advertisers of - for example - “shoes”, “sauces”, and “salvation books” for flashing their ad links to me in rapid sequence when I’m really searching for “salamanders” - logging and reporting each of the undesired search terms as an actual search. Thangs that seem like annoying UI details to us, like the search field being filled in with actual text (forcing us to press backspace to clear it) rather than grayed-out text, may satisfy their legal department’s requirement that the search text actually appeared in the search box before counting it as a valid search. And of course, Google could then use the user’s own desire for privacy policy to tell advertisers it can’t tell who is searching for what - i.e. distinguish between the autocomplete searches and the “real” ones.
Under this model, the annoyance of a few users with the autocomplete UI would have to be balanced against, how many more searches is this feature allowing Google to log, and generate profit off of? If an average Chrome search generates three or four autocomplete searches for every one real search by a non-autocomplete browser, then perhaps 75% or more of real users would have to flee Chrome over autocomplete before it becomes an unprofitable idea.
Under this model, the real victims would be Google’s advertising partners, who are paying for bogus autocomplete searches (and probably getting misleading data) as if Google were actually delivering ads to people looking for their services. e.g. infated search numbers may cause an advertiser to believe people are actually looking for their product, but they don’t buy any from them because they are buying from a competitor - not knowning that many of those “looking” people are really just bogus autocomplete on-the-fly searches. It would probably take mass realization and unity into a class-action lawsuit to make something happen - perhaps unlikely, given how much richer, smarter, and more unified Google is than its myriad competing customers.
I suspect we users are merely pawns in this scheme.
P.S. for those wishing to disable the instant search feature (and this possible scam) from Google’s own home page, try: