Look at my search term. I searched for ‘the word Discuss’. And then look at the Google results.

This is prevalent across almost all Google websites. Here’s a collection of a few (click to enlarge):

I noticed that only in Google Malaysia, there was one measly result for my search term. I thought, maybe in places where English is less spoken, it’ll show more accurate results. So I checked Google China, and just as a comparison, I checked Baidu.

Naturally, the Baidu results are not good. But if you do an inclusive phrase search (i.e. searching for “the word discuss”) in Google itself, it was equally bad. And no, I wasn’t trying to find the definition of ‘discuss’, and I DO know the meaning of discuss.

This is just a curiosity search, to see how smart Google’s algorithm actually is. It is smart, too smart in fact. You see, Google searches using a lexicon. It has a database of commonly misspelt words and phrases. Nobody actually want to search for ‘the Word discuss’- i.e. the search  frequency error is quite low, so Google’s server automatically assumes that I wanted the word “World” instead of “word”.

Note how all countries do not have the “did you mean…” phrase except Google China? Makes you wonder innit?

In the meantime, we can all hope for a better system to come out… pretty soon.

p/s: how many people think that someone will find this article if they search ‘Google fails at work’?

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