Robert_Charlton - 5:57 pm on Oct 4, 2009 (gmt 0)

Hi MookiesMatter, and welcome to WebmasterWorld.

Google Trends shows that there are not enough searches with the term (the one including 'sucks') to have any data to display.

Several comments... Google Trends is useful only for searches with lots of volume. It is not what I'd call a very "granular" tool otherwise. So it's extremely unlikely that Trends would show searches for your particular domain, and even less likely for a more specific search combining your domain name and an adjective.

Does Google Suggest "only" use the amount of searches from other users to determine the results or does Adwords play a role for their Google Suggest suggestions?

Suggest was a Labs project before it became a standard feature on the search box. In the Labs incarnation and in the early days of the search box implementation, numbers were returned along with the phrases. The numbers then reflected the number of pages returned, not search popularity.

Ultimately, Google dropped the numbers, and I think the official word (or popular supposition) was that they did so because they were distracting and people weren't really looking at them. But it's also likely that Google dropped these because they had factored other considerations into the personalized (and perhaps other) configurations of the tool, that the numbers therefore weren't really correlating any more with what the tool was showing in the personalized setup, and it was too complicated to switch displays.

Google's Web Search Help says that historical data is used only when you're logged in, so it may be that you're seeing what you're seeing because you are logged in. In the More about Google Suggest [google.com] section of the Help page, Google describes it this way...

As you type, Google Suggest communicates with Google and comes back with the suggestions we show. If you're signed in to your Google Account and have Web History enabled, suggestions are drawn from searches you've done, searches done by users all over the world, sites in our search index, and ads in our advertising network. If you're not signed in to your Google Account, no history-based suggestions are displayed.

I don't know if you're seeing the problematic suggestions just when you're signed in, or all the time.

Also, if you are signed in... it's not clear from the Google Help description how much your own historical searches are affecting the results you're seeing, vs historical searches from everyone else.

It may be that you're skewing the results just for yourself, or that if you're searching too much for "MyDomain.com sucks", skewing the results for everyone. You'd have to sign out, flush cookies, and sign in under a different account to observe differences.

As an aside to this, there is currently in the Supporters Forum a discussion about what features a useful autosuggest tool should have....

WebmasterWorld Supporters only...
The Importance Of Autosuggest For Search & Ecommerce
[webmasterworld.com...]