Upping the auntie?
Oh, how Google likes to Lord it over you with its spelling suggestions, laughing at the foolish meat-bag bashing at the keyboard. However, it’s not smart enough to suggest homophone corrections, well… not yet.
One of the reoccuring features in the last six months of NTK is Puerile Google Misspellings. A reader mailed today with suggestions for Puerile Google Homophones – correct spellings, wrong words.
One way to check if a phrase is “correct” is to check for common usage. The ranking on the body of information from Google’s spider should be good enough. (Could this method tell if the string contains a weak pun rather than a misspelling? A frayed knot.)
If the LazyWeb hasn’t already done it, I’m tempted to take a look at Google’s API and try it myself.
So, we take a suggested example and its homophone alternatives (assuming we don’t bother with the/thee) and googlefight ‘em:
- “upped the auntie” (1 result)
- “upped the anti” (412 results)
- “upped the ante” (21100 results)
For searches on the first query a smarter google would suggest the third alternative along with the single result.
Also, come to think of it one useful feature for google searches (especially on news.google.com) would be a flag that automatically searched on all common variations of latinized names (possibly ranking by variation/language frequency) without the need for separately specifying them. “Did you mean…?” is misleading when any sound-a-like variation of an arabic name can be considered correct.
Unlike recent newsmakers from the Muslim world, there’s only one way to spell Britney Spears.
