My job involves a lot of fact-checking, and while Google searches are obviously not a reliable method of ascertaining correct spellings, they can be useful when all else fails.
Recently, though, I’ve noticed that Google seems to think It Knows Best, and will return results that include the correct spelling even if my search contains the wrong spelling.
For instance I had an article that mentioned a sea shanty called “Shendoah”. I suspected it might be “Shenandoah” (it is), but that is beside the point.
If I Google shendoa shanty, Google returns pages with Shenandoah highlighted in bold. But surely it should only bold up my search terms, not what it considers to be the right spelling of my search terms!
I know I could Google shendoa shanty -shenandoah to eliminate the “corrected” ones, but it’s annoying if you are trying to compare numbers of results for variant spellings, say.
So, three questions: when did Google start this crap; why; and is there any way of turning it off?
This is not the answer to you question but I once heard a lecture by a high-level officer from Google (I forget his name.) According to him the original impetus for checking alternative spellings in Google searches was Britney Spears because so many people spelled her name incorrectly. Up until then mis-spelled search terms was less common. (I don’t think he was attempting to be humorous and I took it at face value.)
It doesn’t do that. What happens is it says at the top “Did you mean: shenandoah shanty? Top 2 results shown” and then it only bolds those terms in the top 2 results. You have to click the link for ‘shenandoah shanty’ to get the rest of those results. Otherwise it only searches for the misspelling.
And it’s a really, really useful feature. Whether you make a typo or simply don’t have the right spelling for a weird name/word. I don’t understand why this annoys you.
It does that if you search for shendoah shanty. You get more than just the top two results. I’ve noticed this in other searches too.
And to the OP: To get around it, either search for +shendoah shanty or “shendoah” shanty. Both the plus sign and quotes force Google to use that word only (after the Top 2 results that Rigamarole mentioned).
It’s been doing different versions of this for a while. At first there was the “Did you mean X…?” and then there was the auto-stemming technology (i.e. searching for a word would also return results for other forms of that word (verbs, nouns, whatever) and even synonyms), and then I guess they combined the two to predict what they think you meant when you misspelled something.
It IS pretty useful, I must say. And the workaround isn’t to hard to do.
I tried this just now, and got very different results!
I suspect that – somehow – we’re either using different versions of Google, or there’s a custom setting somewhere that some of us set without realizing it.
I agree. And Google is often a faster way of verifying or correcting the spelling of a word than, say, Merriam-Webster online, which requires more keystrokes and sometimes a longer search than does Google. And where M-W often misses correct words entirely if the spelling is off in certain ways, Google will almost always find the word and the correct spelling you’re looking for.
ApexRogers – You’re right. I had copied and pasted from the OP.
The reason it annoys me is because the helpfulness is already being implemented via the “Did you mean: shenandoah shanty” suggestion.
Right now, when I Google on “shendoah shanty”, I get 21,600 hits. Then I click on the “Did you mean: shenandoah shanty” suggestion, and I get 21,600 hits. Presumably the exact same ones, no? So why does it hijack me and give me results that I didn’t ask for?
I think it only hijacks you when your original search term returns so few results that most people wouldn’t find them useful (in Google’s opinion, anyway).
By the way, I would be glad to pay to use a search engine that ONLY returns results with EXACTLY the string I specify (including punctuation and whitespace), without making me jump through any hoops which often doesn’t work anyway.
Or a program that I could easily feed Google’s results into, which would filter out any results that are not an EXACT, PRECISE match.
PatrioGrrrl, have you ever tried Yahoo! Pipes? It’s a web service that lets you take data from one source (like Google search results), tinker with it (like stripping out all non-matching results with a regular expression), and display it as a new list. With some work, it might do what you want.
It’s still not as good as a search engine that does it natively, but it’s a start…