Search suggestions can be a time saver and they’ve certainly improved the searching experience on the main Google site since they’ve been introduced. Google is now working on making suggestions available in a wider set of products. It has recently rolled out better suggestions on its mobile apps and is now making them available in Google Maps for a larger number of countries, after being in testing in Germany and China.

“We experimentally launched suggest for Google Maps in Germany, China, Hong Kong and Taiwan a while ago. Since then, we’ve been working hard to improve the quality and coverage,” Steffen Meschkat, Engineer, and Peter Lidwell, Product Manager at Google, wrote. “So from today we’re making the feature available on 10 more domains and in 8 additional languages, including English and on maps.google.com for the first time.”

When a user starts to type a query, Google will start poling its huge index and look for entries that match the letters typed. It then serves those entries as suggestions and it happens so fast that, in most cases, they are updated instantly after typing a letter. With the wider release, search suggestions on Google Maps are more widely available. But that doesn’t mean the same data is used universally, the suggestions are customized based on the user’s location and previous searches.

“For example, if you search for ‘Mandela’ in San Francisco, you’ll see items such as Mandela High School and businesses in nearby Oakland,” the Google product managers explain. “But more than 8,000 kilometers away in London, you’ll see a completely different set of suggestions, which are more relevant for users searching in that location.”

Users in China, Brazil, Canada, Czech Republic, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Italy, Netherlands, Russia, Spain, Taiwan, United States, and the United Kingdom now have access to the suggestion feature in Google Maps and the developers are saying it will eventually be rolled out to everyone.