Google Teaches Spelling

March 11, 2008 by Reah Guevarra
Filed under: Search

My friend misspelled Philippines a lot of times. It’s not only him though. In his Facebook wall, I saw some of his friends misspelled it too, when they asked him how was his time in this tropical country. I don’t blame them since this is not their country, and there also some Filipinos who misspell it. I just found it funny to see the different incorrect spellings.

So I told him my observations and he said he found it funny too. This time though he finally knew how to spell Philippines correctly, and told me it was a search engine who taught him how.

When he was here, he did some searches related to the Philippines, and he would type it as: philipines, phillipines, or phillippines. But over time, he learned to spell it correctly since he was using Google all the time.

This search engine has a spell checker which offers alternative spelling for queries. It doesn’t say you misspelled the word but it will ask you: “Did you mean: (a more common spelling)?” Even though there are people who find the spell checker feature helpful, some are unsatisfied.

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