Google URL Suggestions

Google's 'Did you mean' function became famous due to several weird suggestions which were long commented by the Internet users. Google always defended the feature saying it is only a technology which is based on users' queries so it cannot be blamed for irrelevant suggestions. However, Google has been working on it and today I found some pretty interesting suggestions offered by it. Philipp Lenssen from Google Blogoscoped wrote that Google now automatically corrects the URL and returns you the real address of the website. Supposing you're typing http://www.softpedia.edu in the search box, Google's 'Did you mean' feature will suggest you searching for http://www.softpedia.org which actually redirects the users to our main page.

What's interesting is that Google doesn't provide the link to the .com domain but it searches for other suffixes such as .org or .net. "No results found for http://www.softpedia.edu. However, there are results from websites with similar addresses," it is mentioned in the suggestions field of the search engine result page. Moreover, the 'Other suggestions' line encourages users to type searching the web with different domain names which in our case would resolve the problem.

In addition to the domain name suggestion, Google's search technology also corrects the URL of the website you searched for. For example, if you type http://www.soffpedia.com in the search box, Google suggests you to search for http://www.softpedia.com. "No standard web pages containing all your search terms were found. Your search did not match any documents. Make sure all words are spelled correctly," it is mentioned on the SERP.

Google's suggestions can be very useful sometimes but there were several cases when the technology proved to be pretty useless for some of us. For example, it caused quite a buzz around it when it encouraged the users searching for "she invented" to look for the "he invented" query.