Live Search Pumps Up With More Features

Just a week after launching voice-command mobile functionality and also improving Live Search experience, Live Search is back with more.

In a post called "Do what I mean, not what I say!," the official Live Search blog informs of two new features.

"We've made a number of improvements in this area of more deeply understanding user intent.

AutoSpell Correction: The first example of this is our new AutoSpell feature. If we are absolutely, completely, totally, "no doubt about it" confident you misspelled one of your search terms, we automatically deliver a page that includes spell-corrected results, rather than a page of misspelled results accompanied by a "Did you mean _______?" link at the top. For example, there's this pizza place near Microsoft called Pagliacci Pizza that is fantastic. The problem is that I can never remember the correct spelling of the place. My misspelled attempts are usually something along the lines of Pagliaci Pizza, Pagliaccis Pizza, or Paggliacci Pizza…

AutoSpell Correction: With AutoSpell correction I get the correct result the first time, regardless of the misspelling. Instead of being two clicks away from pizza, I'm just one. Being two clicks away just keeps people hungry, rather than satisfying their intent! In the (hopefully) rare case that you ever see a mistaken correction in our AutoSpell feature, we provide a recourse link at the top of the page to enforce your original spelling.

Stemming: Another improvement in the "Do what I mean, not what I say" category is stemming. Stemming means matching on the "stem" (or root) of the word rather than the exact word. For example, users told us that the search half price book Redmond returned horrible results. Searching for half price books Redmond produced much better results. In our new release of Live Search, searches for half price book Redmond automatically include results with books in them as well. Our team knew that tackling stemming would give us the improvements we needed for searches like these. But we had to be careful, because you can't just stem all the time-you have to be smart about it. An example of this is the word cable. When you search for "cable," you could be looking for information on cable TV providers. When you search for "cables", you could be looking for power, telephone, or network cables. We're really happy with the improvements that stemming has made in Live Search. Like everything else in the product, we will continue to tune and tweak things to give our users the best experience. These are just the first two of several areas we tackled in the area of "Do what I mean, not what I say." We'll be back soon to post about a few other items we released in this area. Thanks and please let us know what you think!"

Cynics might think this is something that Google's been doing for ages. However, the difference lies in the fact that LiveSearch lets you stick with the precise spelling you entered.

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