November 22nd, 2011

The Control Panel search results understand common misspellings, too

Here’s a little trick. Open your Start menu and type scrensaver into the search box. That’s right, spell it with only one e. Hey, it still found the Control Panel options for managing your screen saver. If you enable Improve my search results by using online Help in Windows Help and Support, this sends your search query to a back-end server to see if there’s updated online help content related to your search. And the people who develop the online help content look over those queries to see if, for example, there is a category of issues people are searching for help with and not finding anything. It also means that they get to see a lot of misspellings. And that information is useful, because it means that the Control Panel search provider can be given a table of the most popular misspellings and how to fix them. which in turn benefits people who unchecked the Improve my search results by using online Help (say because they don’t have Internet access or because they are afraid of the black helicopters). So now, when you search for scrensaver, you are directed to information on screen savers, thanks to the millions of other people who spelled it wrong before you.

Obligatory link: The so-called God mode.

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Raymond has been involved in the evolution of Windows for more than 30 years. In 2003, he began a Web site known as The Old New Thing which has grown in popularity far beyond his wildest imagination, a development which still gives him the heebie-jeebies. The Web site spawned a book, coincidentally also titled The Old New Thing (Addison Wesley 2007). He occasionally appears on the Windows Dev Docs Twitter account to tell stories which convey no useful information.

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