David Given Schwarm

Autocomplete, often called autosuggest, surfaced at Google in 2004 — thanks to a junior software developer named Kevin Gibbs, who saw the technology that taps into the human collective consciousness as inevitable. But Google’s predictive search feature was just the beginning. Nowadays, autocomplete can be found across different devices (e.g., desktops, tablets, and mobile devices) and is incorporated in technologies beyond the search engine, like word processors, email programs, and source-code editors.