Implementing Google suggestions

Question

OK I have a simple task, I just want to use Google's search engine, more specifically, the autocorrect part. Let's say I Google this: https://www.google.com/search?q=matew+mccaonaghey As you can see, Google showed results for "matthew mcconaughey", thus autocorrected the input.

So, I did a bit of research and found that http://suggestqueries.google.com can be used to query such inputs. While it worked OK most of the time, the funniest thing: when I tried to get the result for "matew mccaonaghey", I got back an empty JSON. If I changed search string to "mathew mccoanaghey", the results are OK.

What am I missing? Doesn't suggestqueries.google.com work the same as www.google.com? Why do I get empty json in case of suggestqueries and an actual result when using google.com?

Thank you for your answers.

The code is as follows:

URL url = new URL("http://suggestqueries.google.com/complete/search?output=firefox&client=firefox&hl=en-US&q=matew+mccaonaghey");
URLConnection conn = (URLConnection) url.openConnection();
conn.setRequestProperty("User-Agent",
    "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.2; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/32.0.1667.0 Safari/537.36");
conn.connect();
BufferedReader serverResponse = new BufferedReader(
    new InputStreamReader(conn.getInputStream()));
System.out.println(serverResponse.readLine());
serverResponse.close();

Answer 1

The reason is simple :)
Google is using different internal APIs. The Firefox suggest API is an outdated one and will indeed give you an empty response on some strings. But it can also lead to more or different results, the reason is within Googles code.
Also the new API can return twice the amount of results on a single query.

Check out this Google Suggest Scraper, that's a free/open source PHP project which can scrape both internal suggest/autocompletion APIs, the one you used and a newer one.

I started it in both modes to make sure I am right, here the results:
Firefox mode:

Google Suggest Spider results
Recursion level 0 contains 0 keywords:
| Keyword                                            | Suggests                                           |
| -------------------------------------------------- | -------------------------------------------------- |

New mode:

Recursion level 0 contains 20 keywords:
| Keyword                                            | Suggests                                           |
| -------------------------------------------------- | -------------------------------------------------- |
| matew mccaonaghey                                  | matthew mcconaughey                                |
|                                                    | matthew mcconaughey movies                         |
|                                                    | matthew mcconaughey true detective                 |
|                                                    | matthew mcconaughey alright alright alright        |
|                                                    | matthew mcconaughey oscar speech                   |
|                                                    | matthew mcconaughey diet                           |
|                                                    | matthew mcconaughey speech                         |
|                                                    | matthew mcconaughey dallas buyers club             |
|                                                    | matthew mcconaughey hair                           |
|                                                    | matthew mcconaughey dazed and confused             |
|                                                    | matthew mcconaughey woody harrelson                |
|                                                    | matthew mcconaughey oscar                          |
|                                                    | matthew mcconaughey weight loss                    |
|                                                    | matthew mcconaughey height                         |
|                                                    | matthew mcconaughey workout                        |
|                                                    | matthew mcconaughey hbo                            |
|                                                    | matthew mcconaughey wolf of wall street            |
|                                                    | matthew mcconaughey golden globes                  |
|                                                    | matthew mcconaughey net worth                      |
|                                                    | matthew mcconaughey skinny                         |

Hope that helps.