Tuesday, October 16, 2007

Google URL Spellchecker

Google started to sometimes show URL suggestions if you used the search box as “address box” but mistyped the address. An example: when you enter the query http://googlified.net, Google will return:

No results found for http://googlified.net.

However, there are results from websites with similar addresses:
Googlified
...
googlified.com/
...

At other times, mistyping a URL will return a normal spellchecking result. E.g. entering http://blogoscope.com into Google at this time returns “Did you mean: http://blogoscoped.com”, showing the snippet of blogoscoped.com below.

Ionut Alex. Chitu, who noticed this new behavior, comments on the reason why Google might have introduced this special result type:

Many people don’t know the difference between Google’s search box and the browser’s address bar. This confusion is accentuated by the fact that the address bar is also a search box in some cases and Google, like most search engines, steal the focus from the address bar.

Google URL Spellchecker by Philipp Lenssen | Comments (7)

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