Qweery's look at the world of search

The discussion on wether or not to automatically alter the users search query to one the search engine thinks is correct is subject of a new discussion now that Google seems to be doing this with their “Did you mean” function.

What happens? If you type a query for which Google finds a suggestion, it now shows 2 results for the suggested query at the top of the search results. Below you’ll find the results for the query entered by the user.

Automated correction results by Google

How thoughtfull? I think not, not for a public search engine anyway.

What makes the function ‘Did you mean…’ tick? Well, most probable both present worddata found in all documents indexed by Google and user input combined. Every query is checked with known words and a most common query is build from popular searches similar to the one checked and with more possible results.
Since Google has no limited information domain (it indexes all info found in the world) a particular search, like the one shown in the image above, cannot easily be translated to the one suggested. The subjects are totaly different, only the letter combination is one letter off.

When is it possible to do an automated replacement? Within a website for instance. The information domain on a website is limited and a suggestion comes from information of that website (so don’t use the common API from Google ) and would probably be sensable.

Preferably the user is given an option to save his or hers preffered setting for a next time. An advise to Google: add this as an option to the user preferences!