Google sometimes takes the liberty of âcorrectingâ what it perceives is a spelling error in your query.
If youâve ever used other Internet search engines, youâll have experienced what I call âstupid spellcheck.â Thatâs when you enter a proper noun and the search engine suggests a completely ludicrous query (âElvish Parsleyâ for âElvis Presleyâ). Googleâs quite a bit smarter than that.
When Google thinks it can spell individual words or complete phrases
in your search query better than you can, itâll
offer you a suggested âbetterâ
search, hyperlinking it directly to a query. For example, if you
search for hydrocephelus
, Google will suggest that
you search instead for hydrocephalus
.
Suggestions aside, Google will assume you know of what you speak and return your requested results. Provided, that is, that your query gleaned results.
If your query found no results for the spellings you provided and
Google believes it knows better, it will automatically run a new
search on its own suggestions. Thus, a search for
hydracefallus
finding (hopefully) no results will
spark a Google-initiated search for hydrocephalus
.
Mind you, Google does not arbitrarily come up with its suggestions,
but builds them based on its own database of words and phrases found
while indexing the Web. If you search for nonsense like
garafghafdghasdg
, youâll get no
results and be offered no suggestions as Figure 1-10
shows.
Tip
This is a lovely side effect and quick and easy way to check the relative frequency of spellings. Query for a particular spelling, making note of the number of results. Then click on Googleâs suggested spelling and note the number of results. Itâs surprising how close the counts are sometimes, indicating an oft misspelled word or phrase.
Donât make the mistake of automatically dismissing the proffered results from a misspelled word, particularly a proper name. Iâve been a fan of cartoonist Bill Mauldin for years now, but I continually misspell his name as âBill Maudlin.â And judging from a quick Google search Iâm not the only one. There is no law saying that every page must be spellchecked before it goes online, so itâs often worth taking a look at results despite misspellings.
As an experiment, try searching for two misspelled words on a related
topic, like ventriculostomy hydrocephalis
. What
kind of information did you get? Could the information you got, if
any, be grouped into a particular online
âgenreâ?
At this writing, the search for ventriculostomy
hydrocephalis
gets only two results. Both of them
are for a guestbook at a Developmental (Pediatric) Neurosurgery Unit
at Massachusetts General Hospital/Harvard University. The content
here is generally from people dealing with various neurosurgical
problems. Again, there is no law that says all web materials,
especially informal ones like guest book communications, have to be
spellchecked.
Use this to your advantage as a researcher. When youâre looking for layman accounts of illness and injury, the content you desire might actually be more often misspelled than not. On the other hand, when looking for highly technical information or references from credible sources, filtering out misspelled queries will bring you closer to the information you seek.
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