Google announced a whole host of new improvements at the “Search On” event that will soon be rolling out to the search service over the next few weeks and months. The new additions and changes are primarily focused on using AI and machine learning techniques to provide better search results. The most important one among them all is a new spell checker tool that Google says will help decipher even the worst spelled questions.
Google’s Head of Search, Prabhakar Raghavan said that about 15% of the search queries Google gets everyday are ones that the company has never seen before and thus they must constantly work to improve their results.
A big reason behind these never-seen-before queries is poor spellings. According to Cathy Edwards, VP Engineering at Google, one in every 10 search questions on Google are misspelled. Google has been trying to help this with its “did you mean” feature that suggests the proper spellings.
By the end of this month, Google will be releasing a massive update to that “did you mean” feature which will be using a new spelling algorithm that’s powered by a neural net with 680 million parameters. It runs in “under three milliseconds after each search”, and Google promises it’ll offer even better suggestions for misspelled words.
