Should we expect more spelling corrections in search results?

Let’s have a question from Florida; Marjy in Boca Raton asks “Recently, Google has been more proactive in providing results that feature “corrected” spellings. In what way will smart guesses be employed in search results in the future? Can we expect more synonyms in search results for example?

I think as we look forward we get more and more users and some of those users are not savvy and some of those users don’t know how to spell well. So one figure that I’ve heard is if you look at random queries something like 10% of them might be misspelled. And when we realize just how many queries were misspelled that’s when we decided to write what in my opinion is one of the world’s best spell checkers. But the fact is even if you do that even if you have like a huge click through on ‘did you mean’ there are always some people who didn’t realize that it was there. And so we have introduced a change recently where we will spell correct what we think is the right answer or one or two results and then we’ll show the normal answers down below. Then if you are a user who just didn’t know how to spell it correctly that really helps you out a lot. And in fact it helps the web spam out a little bit as well because people who were just using typos and misspellings you know the regular users don’t stumble on spam as that much as they stumble on good results first. Now if you are really really are a power user and there are a ton of people who are you can always put a + in order to say this is the exact word I’m searching for you can even put it in double quotes you can also put those double quotes even on a single word. So there are lots of ways to tell Google no this is what exactly I meant to search for. We try to be smart so if somebody types something that looks like it’s a misspelling but it’s not, we’ll try to figure that out over time. So it’s not the case where we roll out something and we’ll never make changes for the several more years. Instead we try to come up with something that’s pretty reasonable which works well for the vast majority of users, power users can still have the escape hatch the + sign or the double quotes and if we do make mistakes we try to figure out what can we do to improve it in the next generation of our algorithms or in the next time we push out new data for the spell correcting code. So I think we do a pretty good job about that we are always open to more suggestions ways that we could improve the interface. But that’s probably I wouldn’t be surprised if we continue to improve how we use spell corrections to help out regular users who don’t want to learn the intricacies of search engines who are probably not watching this video they just want to get where they want to go as quickly as possible.

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