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Comment by homosaur | Hacker News Reader

I wish there was some way for the system to ban people if they submit their own blog posts. This is a non-study.

The vast majority of people looking for "java" are looking for the programming language. If they weren't, all those links wouldn't be at the top of Google. For most people, this IS the correct response.

For anyone else, seems like they could just say "huh, programming languages?" And then type "java indonesia," "java coffee," or even "java country." REALLY DIFFICULT

In the first example, all you have to do is click on the non-autocorrected text or even just put that search in quotes. I don't even know why the hell you would look for "college vs. uncollege" anyway, any search for "uncollege" is going to turn up a bunch of pages that talk all about that movement and why it exists.

DDG is a good product, but this article is stupid.

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The article does a good job of highlighting certain instances where using Google is a pain in the ass. I personally don't like the spell-correct feature. For me, it is only correct in its conclusion that I mistyped a word about 10% of the time. The other 90% is a nuisance because I have to go back and explicitly tell it that I meant to tell it what I told it.

it is only correct in its conclusion that I mistyped a word about 10% of the time

I'd love to see your statistics on that - you must use a lot of very unusual words. Google has published a paper about the algorithm they use.

There are two cases:

If Google thinks you might be wrong it will display "Did you mean..." with the possible correction.

If Google is pretty sure you are wrong, it will search for what it thinks is correct and show what you typed originally as an option.

If you are hitting the second case 90% of the time then you are a very, very special snowflake indeed!

I have to go back and explicitly tell it that I meant to tell it what I told it

You have to click on the link to say you really meant what you typed.

you must use a lot of very unusual words

No. I just type more accurately than the average Google user, so when I do type an unusual word it is more likely that I intended to type it.

Google could fix this (with logged in users) by using some type of Bayesian classification algorithm. They could track how often a user subsequently clicks "Showing results for _____" compared to "Search instead for ______". That would give them a self-rated user typing accuracy score they could use to adjust which results to display when they detect a potential misspelling.

For all I know they already do this. However, based on anecdotal evidence from my own experience (admittedly non-scientific), it does not appear that they do.

What makes you think the vast majority of people looking for "java" are looking for the programming language? How many people in the world are programmers and are you biased by your own particular situation?

The rest of the non-programming world is probably full of people wanting to know where to buy Java coffee, or wanting to know something about Indonesian islands.

I'm biased by knowing how Google works.

http://www.google.com/insights/search/#q=java&cmpt=q

The top searches involving "java" are download java, free java, string java, java script, sun, java sun, java code, etc etc. Even in Indonesia, the top searches are about the programming language.

I don't see islands or Indonesia or coffee anywhere.

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