Posted by Jukka K. Korpela on 06/07/07 09:55

Scripsit Sherm Pendley:

> If you search Google for the term "affadavid" (i.e. misspelled),
> you'll get a link to the correct spelling that says "Did you mean:
> affidavit."

The hypothetically tragicomic part of the story is that if search engines
generally paid attention to meta tags and meta tags were widely used to add
misspellings as "keywords", Google might be unable to distinguish between
correct spelling an misspelling - and might treat them as distinct words.

At present, serious pages spell words mostly right, so "affidavit" is far
more common than "affadavid", so Google can suggest the former when a user
(which is, on the average, less literate than page authors) has typed the
latter. It sees a word with few matches, resembling a considerably more
common word. But if authors tried hard to anticipate misspellings, in meta
tags or in page content, they might make their frequency too large, web
wide. If a word gives million hits, it's usually not sensible to ask the
user whether he actually meant a similar word that gives two million hits.

--
Jukka K. Korpela ("Yucca")
http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/

[Back to original message]