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Typo Googling: The next big thing

February 23, 2004 10:50 PM

I got a funny email from Tristan Louis today:  He was typo Googling his name and found that I mentioned him in a blog entry about who reads my blog, but his name was spelled wrong.  I fixed it, and it gave me an idea....

Today Google suggests the correct spelling of words you search for but happen to spell wrong.  To take this awesome feature a step further, Google should suggest popular typo variations as alternative searches when you happen to spell the search terms correctly.

Example 1: Misspellings.  Bloggers, press, and coworkers often spell my name wrong, leaving off the last e in Greene.  If was to Google for Dylan Greene, Google would suggest also searching for Dylan Green.

Example 2: Spacing.  The company I work for is called webMethods, but it is often written as Web Methods.  When searching for webMethods google would suggest "Web Methods" as an alternative.

Example 3: Ordering.  Canon's latest digital SLR is officially called the Canon 300D in the US, but their previous model was called the D30, so people often mistype 300D as D300.  A search for 300D would suggest D300 as an alternative. 

Example 4: Wrong Word. I meant to search for wiring but instead typed wriring.  Apparently wriring is a word too, so Google didn't suggest any alternatives.  Even though wriring is a word it knows about, Google should suggest the far-more-popular word wiring as an alternative.

Thanks for the idea, Tristan!  This make sense to anybody else?

Note: If you search Google today for "Typo Googling"  there are no matches.  I'm looking forward to searching again in a couple weeks or months to see if people use the term.  Meanwhile, Typo Google your name and blog the results.  Find anything interesting?

Comments

It makes sense to me. I like your approach but maybe Google could make a single typo search or fuzzy search suggestion for finding all typo originated results in once place. Is that ok?

Examining my referrers statistics some days ago I was stunned to see how many visitors came to my blog after mistyping some word in a Google search. I make lots of typos because English is not my mothers tongue, so I guess I need to do better spellchecking. But I have been wondering if it makes sense for Google to do something about it too.

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Category: Google
Category: Ideas