Mountain View, California — Google has rolled out countless new search features that indicates both innovation and, in at least one case, represents a response to rival Bing. The search engine colossus has long offered its “Did you mean:” spelling corrections feature, and even fixed your minor typos in its auto-completing suggestions. But now the mistakes are easier to spot. Now Google.com will actively suggest spelling fixes in drop-down suggestions, offering an easy go-to spellcheck tool.
Spelling corrections have become the standard for search engines and the tool does comes in very handy around times, not specifically for poorly spelled words, but for problematic things like complicated names and places.
“These spelling suggestions already exist on the results page, but by moving them to an earlier point in the search process, we hope we have made it faster and easier to get to the results you are looking for. Right now, this feature is offered only for google.com in English, but we are working to roll this out internationally in the near future,” explains Google.
The regular spelling corrections in Google Suggest
The news offers a great solution for industry watchers, search marketers and users of the world’s most popular search engine, which is striving not just to protect its massive hold on users and ad dollars by enhancing its appeal, but to stave off competition from players like Microsoft’s Bing.
“Since we first introduced Google Suggest, we have offered spell-corrected search completions to provide you with similar search queries from other users,” Marissa Mayer, VP Search Products and User Experience at Google, wrote.
“This week we rolled out an update that characterizes Google Suggest even more intuitive and simple. If you are entering a query for which there are no search completions to offer, and yet some of your search terms do seem to be misspelled, Google Suggest will now offer a “Did you mean” suggestion for your query — giving you an option to correct your spelling right away and get on with your search,” she announced.
Google Suggest has always offered corrections for the queries that matched other popular ones. Several new Google improvements aim to make it easier for users to find what they seem to be seeking.
For example, as you enter the letters, B, A, R, A… in the search box, a drop-down menu suggests a list of popular related search terms starting with “Barack Obama”. Yahoo, Bing and other search engines have a similar feature.
The new spelling correction feature in Google Suggest
That is the case with an enhancement to Google Suggest, this made it easier for people to correct their search terms before actually conducting the search. But if your query had no suggestions, you would not realize you have misspelled something until after you ended up on the results page.
A Wall Street Journal article listed some of the most commonly misspelled words in Google and other search engines: “Criagslist” instead of “Craigslist,” “Facebok” instead of “Facebook,” “definately,” “definetly” or “definatly” instead of “definitely,” “stilletos” or “stillettos” instead of “stilettos,” “mischevious” and “mischievious” instead of “mischievous”. Yahoo’s most misspelled word of 2010 so far was Eyjafjallajokull, the famous volcano in Iceland that erupted this year.