Comment by przemoc | Hacker News Reader

Comment by przemoc | Hacker News Reader

Seriously, I was wondering today whether I should ask HN what you think about these google smart inflection and alleged misspelling detection.

I am so tired of this. I do mistakes (after all errare humanum est), but I do it rarely, yet I am enforced to use quotes practically all the time (I am doing it since many months at least, don't remember exact moment, but I think in 2010 there wasn't automatic I-know-better, but only suggestions, correct me if I'm wrong, please). It's such a PITA. Is there maybe some secret search switch that can be used (and turned on in Chrome by default hopefully) to allow me avoiding typing quotation marks (") more than many hundreds times a day. And I still unconsciously always write without them for the first time, and, surprisingly, sometimes get correct results when the terms are ultimately known by everyone.

Before Google only suggested what I am possibly searching for. Why it is so sure now (i.e. this year) to make my original queries second-class citizens? Unbelievable and abominable poise.

> alleged misspelling detection

I agree, it is incredibly annoying.

I touch type and I know how to spell.

I rarely make typing mistakes, and when I do make a typing mistake, I see and notice it because i'm staring at the freaking screen.

(Conversely, when I don't make a typing mistake, and Google randomly changes my search, I don't notice, because I didn't do anything).

Particularly when you are searching for something and google changes it to an off by one that looks similar. For example, today i was trying to find libbcrypt, but Google kept changing the result to libgcrypt, which is not what I wanted, but they look similar enough that I clicked through some irrelevant results before I noticed.

Searches that would have taken one attempt, if Google had done what I told it to, now regularly take at least 2 searches.

I absolutely hate that.

Google needs to introduce a www.google.com/adv interface that doesn't respond, "I think you meant salt water, Dave," when you query for [sat water].

I just noticed today that my searches for "ipadm" return something relevant, rather than assuming that I meant "ipad", and forcing me to confirm that I did actually mean what I typed, which I think was the case just a couple of days ago.

I'm getting suggestions over my original queries definitely for some time already, as I stated earlier. Maybe it's because I am constatly logged in, and this new "great feature" was postponed for general use, i.e. all users. There were cases of such incrementally introduced features before.

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