Mountain View, California — If spelling is not your pack of cards, then cheer up, as Google possibly feeling pressure from Microsoft’s Bing search engine, last weekend unpacked two nifty features of its Google Suggest service–a more localized search suggest that boils down to metro areas and an auto-correction of spellings for name search, in an attempt to help users find the content they are looking for faster.
About a year ago, Google already has an impressive real-time search suggestions that were tailored towards users in different countries, which is capable of automatically spotting spelling mistakes and suggesting correct alternatives.
Finally, Google has decided to do away with its “Did you mean?” link whenever it believes a user misspelled a query on certain searches. To further reinforce that feature, Google is taking a step forward with the renewed version that now considers a user’s location when suggesting queries. So if a person in Chicago types “bull” into the search box, Google might suggest the NBA team. In other areas, the top suggestion relates to something else.
As a result of this modification, Google now becomes competent of delivering spelling suggestions even for names by taking into consideration the textual matter. In addition, Google is also offering smarter corrected spellings for names in 31 languages.
“Did you make an error while looking for “chocolate strawberries and cream” in Italian?” Google technical staff member Pandu Nayak asked rhetorically while showing an example in a blog post.
“The right word is so close at hand you can taste it.”
According to Google, people often search for names, but do not know the exact spelling. For instance if you entered a query for “matthew devin oracle” Google will immediately make out that you are searching for Oracle’s “Matthieu Devin”. Thus, whenever a user adds a person’s profession, affiliation or other related keywords to an approximation of this person’s name, Google will offer better suggestions and more useful spelling corrections.
“Just as the way users in the United Kingdom often search for different things than users in United States, we have found that people in Seattle also have a tendency to look for different things than people in Dallas,” Nayak said.
Both these new features are designed to give you a faster search experience when typing your search keywords as well as minimize the amount of time you devote typing these searches.
Also, this newly released features are currently available only for English spellings in the U.S. However, Google will be extending the change to other parts of the world in the near feature.