Google has had the 'did you mean?' feature for a long time now, and they've recently improved the functionality. If you try and run a search but the spelling is incorrect rather than just say 'did you mean?' and giving you the option of re-running the search Google now shows the top two results from what it thinks that you meant. The graphic illustrates this:
The clever element is that Google assumes fillip means Philip and then shortens it to Phil, before giving results for the term actually searched for.
However, (and with Google there is always an 'however') a search for fil bradley defaults to 'bill bradley'. Consequently if you do know what you're looking for, and it's not a standard spelling the results that you do want are pushed further down the screen, making a search more irritating and less helpful. Of course, if you're participating in the Google labs experiment to move search results around you might think that you can force the result you want to the top, but big G doesn't allow that. Welcome to the world of the Google common denominator!
I do not feel the results are always accurate. For my own website, http://www.themusicage.com, everytime I search "themusicage", the top result shows a Did you Mean for themusicpage.
I wonder what would cause tha algorithms to do this? Do you have to be part of some kind of dictionary?
Posted by: Ajay Garg | February 26, 2009 at 06:03 PM