Wednesday, May 30, 2007

Google Stops "Did You Mean: He Invented"

Google was recently reported to correct the following search queries via their “did you mean?” functionality:


she invented -> Did you mean: he invented
she scored -> Did you mean: he scored
she instructed -> Did you mean: he instructed
she saved -> Did you mean: he saved
she discovered -> Did you mean: he discovered
she golfed -> Did you mean: he golfed
The beliefs and preferences of those who work at Google, as well as the opinions of the general public, do not determine or impact our search results. Individual citizens and public interest groups do periodically urge us to remove particular links or otherwise adjust search results. Although Google reserves the right to address such requests individually, Google views the comprehensiveness of our search results as an extremely important priority. Accordingly, we do not remove a page from our search results simply because its content is unpopular or because we receive complaints concerning it.
From what I know Google’s spell-checker at its core works on phrases which are popular on the web, as opposed to manual edits. It might be Google engineers manually corrected this using a blacklist, or they advanced their algorithm to return more relevant spellcheckings for cases like these – it seems clear that a search query like “she invented” is not likely to be a misspelling

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