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Chris -- 2018-04-11
How do these work? When I put in “Satin worshippers” and am asked ‘Did you mean Satan worshippers’ (‘No, but I’m sure somebody did’) what is happening? Obviously “Satan worshippers” collocates more frequently than “Satin worshippers” but is that it?
As for “Satin worshippers”, it’s out there but is surely more bad spelling than anything else, though once upon a time I’d have sold my soul for a pair of crushed-velvet loon-pants.
Last edited by JuanTwoThree (2010-07-09 11:00:26)
On the plain in Spain where it mainly rains.
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Part of it is based on user behavior. What happens is that if someone searches for a set of terms, doesn’t click any results (or doesn’t get any results), and then searches for another, very similar set of terms and does click a result, it is logged as a possible spelling correction. When enough of these occur for a particular pair of terms, Google will begin offering it as a spelling correction suggestion.
I’m sure they also do analysis on their vast corpus of web documents to find set phrases like “satan worshippers”, but exactly how they mine that information is a more of a trade secret.
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Google spelling correction has been around for a number of years—at least since 2005. It appears to be based on a database of common web misspellings rather than on a mathematical algorithm that permutes search terms and looks for phonetic equivalents. Though the approaches may be blended. See patent description filed in 2007 here.
Until about a year ago, enclosing the search in quotation marks restricted hits to pages containing the exact spelling. Bing still works in this way. Google now gives the user a couple of hits at the top, segmented in a separate section, that correspond to its best-guess spelling correction.
Last edited by kem (2010-07-09 11:26:56)
Hatching new language, one eggcorn at a time.
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