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Interesting Stat from Google: 7% Of Searches Are Misspelled

7% Of Searches Are Misspelled: Google AdWords To Change Match Type Settings

http://www.seroundtable.com/google-match-misspellings-adwords-15029.html

“Google announced that in about 30 days from now [May 18], the way they handle AdWords match types for exact and phrase based matching will change.  Going forward, Google will auto-match for phrase and exact match even for variants including misspellings, singular/plural forms, stemmings, accents and abbreviations.

Why?  Google has said that over 7% of all queries contain misspellings.  Google also explained that Google’s organic results already do this and they want to make sure the AdWords results do the same.  Google added that in early tests it  has led to an increase in clicks by 3%.”

Have you ever sampled your OPAC or licensed database searches and determined the rate of misspellings?  I wonder if it varies by user niche – K-8 students, high schoolers, higher ed, public library cardholders, intranet users…?

Stephen

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Posted on: May 3, 2012, 7:20 am Category: Uncategorized

By: stephen

rev="post-13200" 3 comments

3 Responses

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  1. Karen said
    on May 3, 2012 9:12 am

    We were just talking about that yesterday as a staff member was trying to help a faculty member find something in the OPAC. They ended up googling the word so that they could find alternate spellings and then used that in the search. The OPAC just will not accept alternate or misspellings which makes me wonder if that’s not one of the causes when our students complain that we don’t have any resources at all!

  2. K.G. Schneider said
    on May 3, 2012 9:13 am

    Yes, I did that kind of analysis at Librarians’ Index. Indeed, misspellings are common, and spelling correction and autocomplete are real boons in any search product. That said, this isn’t exactly pioneering theory. A lot of work in this area has been done in the last decade. What’s more interesting to me is why this came so late to AdWords, a commercial enterprise where people are paying Google for their expertise in attracting people to ads.

  3. admin said
    on May 3, 2012 12:42 pm

    Hi Karen:
    Most major OPACs have plug-ins that do this. Interestingly, most libraries don’t install them…
    Stephen