The short answer is, it happened relatively recently. I want to say November-ish of 2008, so relatively recently. And when do we show it? Well, when we’re even more sure that it’s something useful.
Not everyone clicks on “Did You Mean”. They’re not savvy, or didn’t see it, they get blindness, so they don’t click on that result, which is probably going to help them a lot.
So, if we think there’s a high prior probability that this would be very helpful suggestion to users, not just a normal search result; but really, really helpful, like if they spell it badly, or if we think there are great results waiting for them just around the corner, if only they would do this corrected search, then we’re willing to show this new user interface.
It’s not perfect 100% of the time, you can always use the + sign, or put a phrase/keyword in double quotes to do exactly the search you want to do. If we do have bad search results, we’ll try to learn that over time and improve on individual algorithms. We have seen a real quality improvement for majority of users.
Related posts:
- Recently, Google has been more proactive in providing results that featured “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?
- In some queries I can see the date of the post/article in the description snippet (at Google search). Why? Can I tell Google not to use it? If yes, how?
- How does someone begin to SEO their site on a small budget in an overwhelmed industry such as real estate?
- As far as big brands go, why is it that they seem to do well irregardless of relevance, content or links when analyzing keyword placement in search engine result pages?
