Jay Meydad's Life Mashup

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.

In the last year I have seen several house ads running on the AdSense network, promoting different Google services such as Chrome, Picasa and Google Analytics. But today while reading TechCrunch, I saw for the first time an ad targeted to acquire new advertisers.

I wonder if that is a response to the fact Microsoft AdCenter came out of beta recently or to the Bing launch, a search engine that I highly recommend using.

BTW, does anyone know if (and how much) Google pays publishers when visitors clicks on these house ads and take action (download picasa or chrome, sign up for analytics or as advertisers)?

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