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Comment by gallerytungsten | Hacker News Reader

re: "Google over does search" (and "autocorrects" your search).

This "feature" has been getting steadily more annoying, particularly with more obscure words, or words where there is a similar word that's in more widespread use.

Thinking about it now, I was wishing there was a way to turn off this feature; but alas, a dive into http://www.google.com/preferences doesn't seem to have "turn off that dang autocorrect" as an option.

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Append &nfpr=1 (short for "no full page replacement") to all your google queries:

For example:

http://www.google.com/search?q=college+or+uncollege&nfpr...

I am sure it's not that hard to write a greasemonkey script to do that for you automatically, but I tend to like the feature, especially when I fat finger queries with my cell phone.

If you're using Chrome's omni bar to search, you can permanently append that query parameter in the search engine settings in the preferences to avoid having to specify it explicitly.

In firefox (and others) you can create a bookmark and give it a keyword.

Two different ways to do it: http://johnbokma.com/firefox/keymarks-explained.html http://support.mozilla.com/en-US/kb/Smart%20keywords

If you use google as your homepage, you can change the address to something like that:

http://www.google.com/webhp?complete=0&hl=en

You can add as many parameters as you want [1]. I use complete=0 to disable suggestions (I don't need/want them) and hl=en to force the interface language to be in english

[1] http://yoast.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/07/google-url-param...

In the screen shot in this article, you see some text with a link "Search instead for 'College or Uncollege?' above the results which takes you to the results for the original query. It's possible that the author didn't notice this though.

Just a theory, but I suspect this form of autocorrect is helping more than hurting, it's just that it's easy to not notice when things work well and very visible when they don't.

Surround the uncommon term in quotes and it won't be autocorrected.

Sadly this has not been reliable for quite a while. Much of the time such a search will only suggest the autocorrection, but for words that are rare enough instead of getting a tiny list of matches google will _still_ assume that it's a typo on your part. Its notorious weakness with words that have uncommon punctuation or embedded letters also kicks in for double-quoted phrases under some circumstances and worse, it'll come up with truly asinine substitutions - searches for "prominent female open source developers" used to drop the double-quotes since they were returning no hits and then ignore the "female" part. Net effect? Until you got to the bottom of the page you might be a bit confused by why there were no women mentioned in the first page of results. That example was fixed, possibly by shifts in their index, but I still run across problems google trying to outguess me on exact phrases from a text I'm trying to locate every day or two.

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