When did Google start displaying “Did you mean” results?

BlindFiveYearOld in SF asks “When did ‘Did you mean’ search results begin to be displayed? And what is the criteria for presenting ‘Did you mean’ search results above the normal search results?”

The short answer is, it happened relatively recently; I want to say like Novemberish of 2008. So relatively recently is the first time you might have seen it. And when do we show it is when even more sure it’s something useful. Because not everybody clicks on ‘Did you mean’. They are not savvy or they didn’t see it they get blindness so they don’t click on the result which is probably going to help them a lot. So if we think there’s a high prior probability that this will be a very helpful suggestion to users not just a normal search result but really really helpful like they misspelled it badly or we think there are great results waiting for them just around the corner if only they would do this corrected search then we are willing to show this new user interface. And it’s not perfect 100% of the time, you can always use the plus sign or put a phrase or keyword in double quotes to do exactly the search you wanted to do. But if we do have bad search results we’ll try to learn that overtime and improve on the individual algorithms but we have seen a real quality improvement for the majority of users.

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