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Comment by shamshiel | Hacker News Reader

Yup, there have been plenty of times I've put quotes around my search terms and Google decided I didn't really mean to put quotes around them.

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What do you think Google should do with the following search:

   Who said, "To hair is human?"

I would want Google to leave it alone and suggest what it thinks is correct as an option, like it used to.

I'd rather see:

  exact: Who said, "To hair is human?"

Quotes are too easy to be used accidentally by laymen.

Shift+2 just slips in their typing without any intention?

I summarized the madness a while ago. I think today the situation is somewhat better but here it is: http://techinorg.blogspot.com/2013/03/what-is-going-on-with-...

@nimble: what about when you intentionally search for a misspelling?

Wow. I was definitely not expecting this: http://i.imgur.com/9Zpqota.png

Thanks for pointing that out.

That's a massive fail for Google IMO. Why isn't it matching phrases for the search recommendation? Surely "to err is human" popularised by Pope [a million plus results] should be suggested before "to heir is human" (a minor computer game) [60k results].

Interesting!

"heir" is a much closer match for "hair" in terms of Levenshtein distance[1] (which indicates a typing error) and soundex[2] (misheard). But clearly "to err is human" should be offered as a possibility too.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levenshtein_distance

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soundex

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