I wasn't sure because this never bothered me so I did a little experiment by searching for
"does it warn about mispellings"
(Note the intentional misspelling above.)
And here is the result:
We haven’t found anything.
There are no results that match all your keywords exactly.
Check your spelling, try different keywords, or try without quotes:
does it warn about mispellings
Edit: I then tried to repeat the experiment with only one misspelled word which was harder because misspelled is misspelled in several different ways across the web, so the first most realistic misspellings actually returned real results.
When I came as far as "mixspeling" however it came back with the same result as the one I pasted in above.
Thanks for checking! This result is too verbose (first two sentences mean the same, but also aren't needed since you already see no results), and then instead of the "check your spelling" it should just, you know, check my spelling :) and show an active link to the quoted query with typos corrected
And the suggestion shouldn't only show when you've found nothing, it should be a basic spellcheck correction suggestion - since the web also has misspelled words you might not even notice the mistake since you see some results and think it's ok
Quotes are supposed to be for verbatim searches, so having the search engine "fix spelling" (in quotes because a lot of the time it's not a misspelling, just a specialized term or something like that) in them is kinda counterproductive and it's incredibly annoying when Google does that.
If you get zero results, you'd probably see the mistake prettty fast, right?
I imagine most often (like 90%+ of cases) when one searches for phrases they would be a result of copy-pasting from another source, so handling this case in a special way would just not be worth the effort.
And what if it's not 90%, but 50%? It's definitely wrong for me, I most often use it to exclude irrelevant results, and I'd imagine it's also wrong in general case for such a targeted search engine
The "effort" is using the same typo detection algorithm you use for non-quoted search to display the same warning
Also the benefit of a warning is that you can press a correction link to automatically fix and restart search, which is better UI
> The "effort" is using the same typo detection algorithm you use for non-quoted search to display the same warning
If you were a paying customer you could submit this idea in the forums and someone will actually look into it. I have sent in a few ideas and I think most have been accepted and fixed/implemented within a few weeks.
