Yes. And that is where I think it goes wrong. The fact that a lot of people misspell should not be used to correct a person's right search to a wrong one. That's not the right thing to do. It should suggest a different search, but not change my search altogether.
As an example, if I place an order for a Chicken Burrito but am served a Beef Burrito because that's the most popular dish, it would not be okay. Same applies to search.
Google is much, much more advanced.
Yes! I said they over did it.
Obviously in that situation they would just ask you to clarify your order before making a burrito, but if they had the ability to serve burritos as fast as Google serves results, then for the majority of cases (assuming the beef burrito is most popular) the outcome is satisfactory and it isn't worth the time or effort to ask and wait for an answer.
the menu contains almost every word in almost every language that's online (plus many misspellings and made up words and lists of meaningless character permutations and...), so if you are going to automatically correct a query, some set of words that are on the menu are going to have to be excluded.
On the other hand, if we accept that this case was suboptimal, the solution seems to be one of:
1) never autocorrect, only offer a "did you mean." I would bet this would result in more people having to click than the current situation (in spite of the annoyances reported in this thread).
2) be more conservative with corrections and offer a "did you mean" more often. 500,000 results for "uncollege" and the fact that correcting it to "college" repeats a word in the query string is a good argument for this particular case, at least. On the other hand, testing for "[some random word] and uncollege" never seems to correct for uncollege unless the other word is education related, which is interesting. While the autocorrect isn't smart enough to notice that it's correcting to a repeated word, it is doing some kind of clustering and deciding you probably meant college in this case.
Put 500k people in bucket 1, and 500k people in bucket 2, and see what happens.
It's pretty obvious to me that the vast majority of times I see that correction message, that I've actually misspelt a word, and that it's pretty rare that I did actually want to search for "dictonary".
I would rather have a search that corrected typos and aimed for the best result which I could rapidly correct than a search which slavishly returned "No results for 'hgihway', did you mean 'highway'?" (as a simple example).
If you actually want to search for "hgihway", search for "+hgihway": https://duckduckgo.com/?q=%2Bhgihway
Of course, Google has results for "hgihway": https://encrypted.google.com/search?hl=en&sa=X&ei=mV...
Or just show the Wikipedia article on Philosophy :)
Re: local search, we're bringing in datasets from services like Yelp. For an example see: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=Wood+tavern. We're always looking to improve, so if you've got interesting local data, please reach out.
Here is what you have to do to get results for Java coffee if you are using Google:
Type “Java”,
parse results and see that you didn’t get the desired results,
type space, “c”, “o”, “f”
And DuckDuckGo:
Type “Java”,
press enter,
parse results and see that you didn’t get the desired results,
expand right category in the disambiguation list,
click on “Java coffee” in the expanded list
It’s a wash, it really is.
Scala also has multiple meanings. As of 3 months ago, it was almost impossible to find relevant pages about "Scala" or Lift through Google without knowing including more relevant information ("Scala Language" or "Lift Scala").
1) visually skip the sizable disambiguation list
2) parse the main results, find they don't match (DDG is all about java language just like google on 'java')
3) go back and parse the disambiguation list
4) click the category to expand
5) parse the newly expanded list
6) click the relevant entry
7) wait for a new search
8) parse the main results again
I mean, seriously, a second word in your search is hardly cognitively onerous. Are we really so spoiled as to demand perfect results on short, ambigiuous topics?
Likewise, it doesn't even make any sense to search for "college or college" without quotes. It makes even less sense when the internet includes an exact match on "college or uncollege". Oddly, a search for "college and uncollege" (without quotes) finds the article in the #1 position. Again, is it too much to ask that Google include a few exact match results even when it strongly suspects a miss-spelling?
Downvote? Really?
But if you typed "cup of java" or "java island" there would be no mistake. Those people wanted coffee and Indonesia. So that's what links you get.
I have used DuckDuckGo as my primary search engine. But it is not competition for Google. Google is much, much more advanced.
If I typed in a proper name and that proper name was tied to an address in my area such as by being in the local white pages or having an address on a website, I would see the local result for that name because Google looked up the geolocation of my IP. That sounds a little creepy, but I got what I wanted. Google gave that link extra weight for being near my location therefore it wasn't buried on page 50. That's incredibly smart. How would DDG solve the same problem? It doesn't even try.