Doc Searls Weblog

8 responses to “A new Google “feature””

1. Friends of Dave (friendsofdave) ‘s status on Wednesday, 12-Aug-09 20:57:20 UTC – Identi.ca

   August 12, 2009 at 4:57 pm

   […] http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/doc/2009/08/12/a-new-google-feature/ […]

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2. 

   Matt Cutts

   August 12, 2009 at 6:34 pm

   I’ll mention this. Looks like there’s a Kenneth D. Searles and a William A. Searles that both work on various types of infrastructure, so for many searchers this might be a good suggestion.

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3. 

   Doc Searls

   August 12, 2009 at 8:06 pm

   Thanks, Matt.

   I suspect increased algorithmic weighting of surname prevalence. "Searles" is much more common than "Searls".
   Here’s what Mongabay says…

   Searle:

   – SEARLE ranks # 7059 in terms of the most common surnames in the United States for 2000.
   – SEARLE had 4,369 occurrences in the 2000 Census, according the U.S. government records.
   – Out of a sample of 100,000 people in the United States, SEARLE would occur an average of 1.62 times.

   Searles:

   -SEARLES ranks # 5367 in terms of the most common surnames in the United States for 2000.
   – SEARLES had 5,970 occurrences in the 2000 Census, according the U.S. government records.
   – Out of a sample of 100,000 people in the United States, SEARLES would occur an average of 2.21 times.

   Searls:

   – SEARLS ranks # 17141 in terms of the most common surnames in the United States for 2000
   – SEARLS had 1,526 occurrences in the 2000 Census, according the U.S. government records.
   – Out of a sample of 100,000 people in the United States, SEARLS would occur an average of 0.57 times.

   So Searls is roughly 1/4 as common as Searles, which is more common than Searle. Perhaps that’s why Google suggests a user might mean "Searles" instead of "Searle" when searching for "Searls".

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4. 

   Pandu Nayak

   August 12, 2009 at 9:53 pm

   I’m a member of the spelling team at Google. Thanks for pointing this out. You’re right that there are some legitimate reasons why our system might think it’s a potentially good suggestion. We’ve done an analysis of this particular case and have some ideas on how to fix this and other similar cases. We’ll try those ideas out and with any luck, it will help with such cases in the future. On the bright side, we don’t trigger searls->searles for more clearcut queries such as [searls] or [doc searls]. Thanks again for mentioning this.

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5. 

   Ben

   August 13, 2009 at 1:31 am

   Bing seems to already have the upper hand in a lot of the queries. I’ve been eager to see what people think. I’ll probably force myself to switch over in the near future. I guess we’ll have to wait and see if Bing can take over. Still, didn’t they say in one of their announcements that they’re goal isn’t to dominate the search engines, but only to climb to the #2 spot?

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6. 

   Doc Searls

   August 13, 2009 at 4:27 pm

   I’ve been using more of Bing, but I don’t think of it as “switching.” More like “adding.” I find Bing’s birds-eye view in Maps especially helpful in many cases. Nothing else like it.

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7. 

   Doc Searls

   September 12, 2009 at 5:20 pm

   Pandu, if you’re still following this thread, I see no difference yet. FWIW, etc.

   Reply
8. Doc Searls Weblog · Chaining links

   September 20, 2009 at 1:57 am

   […] while we’re at it, I’m still not happy that searches for my surname always ask me if I’ve misspelled it — a recently minted Google feature that I still consider a problem and which hasn’t […]

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