Yovav (Jay) Meydad's Personal Blog » Ask http://www.meydad.com Thoughts on social applications, usability, search, mobile, music and sports Sun, 05 Feb 2012 08:46:15 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3.1 Google Suggest’s Hidden Feature – Spell Checker http://www.meydad.com/2009/07/02/the-hidden-feature-of-google-suggest/ http://www.meydad.com/2009/07/02/the-hidden-feature-of-google-suggest/#comments Thu, 02 Jul 2009 15:00:03 +0000 JayMeydad http://www.meydad.com/?p=1129 A few months ago Google officially released Google Suggest to be a primary feature on Google’s home page. In a blog post that announced this, the product managers in charge of the feature explained the different improvements including personalized suggestions, navigational suggestions (link to official site) and sponsored suggestions (very similar to the Israeli PredictAd).

Today I discovered another hidden feature that I was not aware of – suggestion of the right spelling for a query that contains a misspelling. For example, start typing the the query “waist of t” and Google will suggest terms such as “waste of time” or “waste of space”. Pretty cool as it saves you the extra “Did you mean?” search.

By the way, when comparing this feature of Google Suggest to the other search engines, I would rank them in the following order:

  1. Google – variety of offers and misspelling correction
  2. Ask – misspelling correction but small variety of suggestions
  3. Yahoo – strong bias towards suggesting misspelling
  4. Bing – No variety, no misspelling correction. Still needs to do major improvements in that area.

Google Suggest fixing typos

Ask Suggestions - fixing typos

Yahoo Suggest - Fixing Typos

Bing Suggestions - Fixing Typos

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