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Re: Google phrase corrections

  • Subject: Re: Google phrase corrections
  • From: Roy Schestowitz <newsgroups@schestowitz.com>
  • Date: Wed, 20 Jul 2005 04:57:24 +0100
  • Newsgroups: alt.internet.search-engines
  • Organization: schestowitz.com / Manchester University
  • References: <dbhlub$2o7s$1@godfrey.mcc.ac.uk><dbhmgb$7cc$1@lust.ihug.co.nz> <1121795148.757973.192710@z14g2000cwz.googlegroups.com> <dbjlei$foa$1@lust.ihug.co.nz>
  • Reply-to: newsgroups@schestowitz.com
  • User-agent: KNode/0.7.2
Chris Hope wrote:

> Fritz M wrote:
> 
>> Chris Hope wrote:
>> 
>>> In a lot of cases Google picks up typos when the search is done and
>>> you get the page asking you if you meant to spell it the correct way.
>> 
>> In Roy's "Oogle earth" example, though, Google isn't offering
>> corrections. Interesting.
> 
> I was surprised it didn't pick that one up myself. One of the
> mispellings I did once was "Freebsie" when the brand name is actually
> "Freesbie". Google still hasn't learnt it's an incorrect spelling yet,
> and the two sites I have it mispelled on come up within the first few
> results. The original site I left with the mispelling (hey why not!)
> and the second one I added it in with a note saying it's often
> mispelled and had the mispelling. Gets me a bit of traffic each day :)
>  
> The funny thing is, when you spell it correctly Google asks if you meant
> to search on "frisbie"
> 
>> I intentionally misspell words on some of my web pages or include
>> common variations of a word, usually for proper nouns like city names,
>> restaurants, people and so forth.

I hadn't realised what Fritz pointed out until he did. However, Google
corrections are often as naive as one would expect them to be.

A Google index of valid tokens considers 'Oogle' (whatever it may be) to be
a valid word. It also considers 'Earth' to be a valid word. Finding the
correlation between words and proposing corrections based on strings of
words is computationally a hard task. Google Suggest is capable of pairing
(or tupling) words based on the number of results, but if you introduce
this extra dimension of misspellings and consider all possible things that
can go wrong with spelling, you ask for too much. You would not get search
results quickly enough OR, if doing it off-line, you could have Google
spend a lot of computer power optimising searches in this way.

Roy

-- 
Roy S. Schestowitz
http://Schestowitz.com

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