subject: The New Improved Google [print this page] Google just announced a few weeks ago that it was designing a few new changes into its search engine to try to help people put a search together in less time, and to help them along when they didn't quite know how to spell something. As a part of this plan come a few new changes to Google Suggest now. Google Suggest is the Auto-complete function that is a part of the Google search box, that tries to complete your query the moment you start typing one. It used to be that this useful feature would tailor your auto-complete to the country you were in. So if you were using Google in the Middle East and you started to type in the letter "Sau" to make Saudi Arabia, Google suggest would probably pick it up as soon as you gave it the first three letters. Those very same three letters in Germany would bring up something like sauerkraut.
Now though, Google Suggest is narrowing it down to the city you're in. If in Frankfurt you start typing in "Kos", you would be suggested a famous Eastern restaurant in the city whose name starts with those letters. If you were to try that in a more Jewish part of Germany, say Berlin, you'd probably get Google to suggest you "kosher". There are other areas of change that Google is bringing in too to help people with search. Google has some really powerful spelling correction abilities. Any time you leave in a typo in a search query, Google comes back right away and asks you if you really meant something else. The new Google spelling checker is able to extend its abilities to thousands of common names of people and places. It isn't just famous names that it can recognize in a misspelling either. Given the smallest context to bring in a little meaning from, the new Google spelling checker can usually make great educated guesses. If you spell the name of a friend youre looking up wrong, but you happen to mention in the search query what city or company he works for, it can probably find out who youre talking about. For instance, if you are searching for a friend named Michael Corr, and you spell it Michel Cor, if you provide some context to Google and say Michel Corr Dublin bakery , Google would probably zero in on your man. And going further, Google is able to do this in 31 languages too. So if you need to search in a foreign language and your spelling is not too good, Googles built-in spell checker right away will set you straight. Googles search algorithms are aimed entirely at trying to guess what it is a search string actually means. Being able to see the right spelling from the wrong and to be able to tell what location a person is searching from is certainly going to add to its abilities a great deal.
