Misspellings Caught In Google Suggest

Jun 7, 2010

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Google has made several changes in order to help a user find what they may be looking for and one of those major changes was the launch of Google Suggest which would provide suggestions as you were typing making it very helpful to find things faster. This week Google has made an update to Google Suggest by catching misspellings and adding the “Did You Mean” feature to the home page. Here is what the old Google Suggest feature used to look like when something was misspelled:
google suggest misspelled queries old version

As you can see there is a misspelling in the very first word where ergonomic is spelled egonomic. Google Suggest simply lets it go and continues to provide other related suggestions. Google has used the “Did You Mean” feature in their search results pages for awhile and will sometimes not even ask you a Did You Mean question and show you the misspelled results. Instead it will just tell you they are showing you results for the correct spelling.
search results page in google showing did you mean feature

With Google continually improving the ways that they can help users identify when they have misspelled something the Google Suggest team decided they can catch users who are misspelling words even before they get to the search results page. Here is what the new version of Google Suggest looks like when something is misspelled:
google suggest with misspellings new version

As you can see Google Suggest will now put in red the phrase “Did You Mean” and follow it with bolding the word that is misspelled. This is another perfect example of why it has continually been spoken of by a lot of SEO’s that targeting and optimizing for misspelled words is not a good practice at all. While it is true that there still are a lot of people who will continue to misspell words and phrases, those same people will also say yes when Google tells them “Did You Mean” and then they will click on the correctly spelled word and continue from there.

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