Microsoft's Live Search product has rolled out two enhancements to try and better understand user input to return improved results: AutoSpell and Stemming. The AutoSpell feature recognizes common misspellings and returns them in the results, rather than the Google approach of asking you "did you mean McDonalds?" if you enter "MacDonalds" as your search term. Thus, Live Search saves you one page of further digging.
The second enhancement, stemming, looks at the root of the word rather than the exact word to try and include more relevant results. As an example, the Live Search team says a search for "half price book" will now include the same results as "half price books." Meanwhile, you can still use quotes around your term for situations where an exact match is more appropriate.
Overall, these are logical enhancements that should help improve Live Search results, so thumbs up to the Microsoft team.
User comment: By: AngelosNot to dogpile on Peter, but I agree with Adam on the Microsoft improvements. Reaching toward more semantic understanding requires incremental changes such recognizing "half price books" instead of a book about half-priced items (this would surely be an amazing read though :).
User comment: By: Adam OstrowTrue, although Google asks you "did you mean ....." when you make a spelling error, which then requires an extra click to see the proper results. Not an especially big deal, but an improvement over the status quo.
Visit here to subscribe to these commentsUser comment: By: Peter Van Dijck"Thumbs up"? Not having spellchecking and stemming is like having a 1985 search engine. These are basics.. thumbs up doesn't really seem appropriate, "about time" is more like it :)
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