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When did Google start displaying “Did you mean” results?

When did Google start displaying “Did you mean” results? - answered by Matt Cutts

Matt's answer:

CUTTS: BlindFiveYearOld in San Francisco asks “When did “Did you mean” search results begin to be displayed? And what is the criteria for presenting “Did you mean” search results above the normal search results?” The short answer is, it happened relatively recently. I want to say like November issue 2008. So relatively recently, it’s the first time you might have seen it and when do we show it, when we were even more sure that there was something really useful because not everybody clicks on the “Did you mean”. They’re not savvy or they didn’t see it. They get blindness and so they don’t click on that result, which is probably going to help them a lot. So if we think there is a high prior probability that this will be very helpful suggestion to users, not just a normal search result but really, really helpful, like they misspelled it badly or we think there’s great results waiting for them just around the corner, if only they will do this corrected search, then we’re willing to show this new user interface and it’s not perfect, 100% of the time. You can always use the plus sign or put a phrase or a keyword in double quotes, to do exactly the search you wanted to do, but if we do have bad search results, we’ll try to learn that over time and improve on the individual algorithms but we have seen a real quality improvement for the majority of users.

by Matt Cutts - Google's Head of Search Quality Team

 

Original video: