At first, I thought it was a built-in spell checking feature of the browser, but after seeing additional reports and then seeing it myself last night, it seems to me to be a new feature Google is testing.

Here is a screen shot of it in action:

I’ve had several other people confirm Google was showing them this red squiggly line for this search query last night. This morning, I am no longer seeing it.

I received a report on this from an anonymous reader, saying he is seeing it for other search queries. He showed me some brand searches, all spelled correctly, but Google showing it as a spelling mistake by showing the red squiggly line underneath it.

Again, this is not a browser spell checking feature, it was Google adding spell checking to the search box.

I asked Google to confirm this and have yet to hear back.

Postscript: Alex Hall commented, noting that Google has added a background image at google.com/images/experiments/wavy-underline.png which is the exact same color and wave of the underline we reported above. This is just one more piece of evidence that this is indeed a Google test.

Google said if “you’re typing a query for which there are no search completions to offer, and yet some of your search terms do seem to be misspelled, Google Suggest will now offer a “Did you mean” suggestion for your query.” So this will only come up with no search completions are there and if there is a misspelling in your query. It will not currently offer a spelling correction if there are search suggestions available.

Also, right now, this feature is only available on the English version of Google.com. Google does hope to roll it out to more languages in the future.

Here is a sample picture of how it works:

Years ago, Google would automatically change your spelling if it found no matches for what you looked for. That annoyed me, to the point I pushed for it to change in 2002. It annoyed several others in the search and research fields. Maybe it didn’t annoy general users. But Google eventually dropped it, so that it was no longer making some decision on your behalf.

The automatic change under discussion today is different. In a search for oper labs, Google instead automatically seems to be searching for opera labs. What’s wrong with that? Nothing, as long as you know the search has changed.

Other search engines have done this before. In 2001, I recall MSN Search changing spelling so that it flagged you when an auto-correction happened. I seem to remember the AllTheWeb service also experimenting with changing queries for you and disclosing if this was done, so people could override the decision. AltaVista did various types of automatic phrase searching behind the scenes beginning in 1998, such as I talked about here. You could tell this most of the time because it would show you somewhere exactly the query that was done. You had to hunt for the disclosure, but it was there.

I’ve got no problem with automatic changes happening, as long as it’s clearly shown somehow what you searched for. If Google wants to auto-correct spelling, more power to them. But tell users if this is happening.

Want a good example of this? Search for incredibal on Yahoo. Look at the bottom of the page, and you’ll see:

In order to get better results, we searched for more than what you typed.
To get an exact match for what you typed, use the plus sign: +incredibal

Nicely done. And that type of disclosure helped William "IncrediBill" Atchison understand why he disappeared from Yahoo last month when an automatically spelling change kicked in. Don’t worry — Yahoo got it all fixed in the end.

It’s important to note that in the case at Google, something other that automatically spelling correction might be making the change. I think it’s stemming.

Google does stemming, added in late 2003 and explained here. This is where a search where it seeks the word you searched for and variations of that word. It might be looking for [opera] as a stemming variation of [oper].

Indeed, I suspect that’s the case. Consider this:

• opera labs: 1,390,000 matches
• oper labs: 31,900,000 matches

See how the second search is broader, brings back more matches than the first one? This suggests that Google must be looking doing more than changing [oper] to [opera], otherwise the counts would be the same. Instead, I think it is looking for both those words and giving ranking preference to those that are saying [opera labs].

Of course, we wouldn’t have to guess if Google somehow indicated that stemming was happening. FYI, to override stemming, add a + symbol in front of words you won’t want it to get variations of, such as:

+oper +labs

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