Google misspellings stats for "britney spears"

[noahl]

It seems really weird that every single one of these spells "spears" correctly.

Is this supposed to be a representative list of misspellings? Or given that it's posted under /jobs, is it data for an interview exercise of something like that? (The page doesn't say.)

[aamar]

As I mentioned below, it's used to illustrate that Google works on cool stuff on a page called "Why Work at Google?".

But it's an interesting question: what kind of puzzle could use this as source data? How about something along the following lines: Construct a simple probabilistic program (or FSM, with probabilistically weighted transitions) which outputs variants in proportion to the misspellings in the file.

[AshleysBrain]

The fact they have mistakes as bad as "brtittny" but nothing wrong with "spears" suggests to me the data was generated by a query along the lines of "<something like britney> spears" (i.e. the query specified it had to end in "spears").

[blauwbilgorgel]

I remembered seeing these stats before. They are a few years old, right? Google lists the publishing date for those stats as 1 April 2002. Seems like a subset too.

I really enjoy using Google's spelling correction, but what really would blow my mind, is if I one day can search for:

  ntoymru d[rstd

and get results for "britney spears". It seldomly happens when I calibrate my index fingers over the wrong keys.

[Alterlife]

> ntoymru d[rstd

>It seldomly happens when I calibrate my index fingers over the wrong keys.

I actually do that on purpose a lot... "unreadable password generator".

[Jun8]

Now, when I first saw this, I hypothesized that the number of mistakes would go down roughly with edit distance. Not exactly true, see for yourself:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0Ao73DTH98IRgdC1...

I used a perl module (http://search.cpan.org/dist/Text-Levenshtein/Levenshtein.pm) to calculate the edit distances.

[d_r]

Many of the differences aren't typoes (classified by edit distance) but sound-alikes.

[aamar]

Know off-hand why "britnay" and "briteny" come up as edit distance 6? Compare "britanny" at 2.

[nixme]

Not a single person misspelled "spears" as "speers" ?

[barumrho]

By the time you spelt britney wrong, I would think Google will complete the whole name.

[seagaia]

Do they only have those stats for "britney spears"? (And if so...why?)

I looked (admittedly not very hard) to see if this was some kind of google lab where you query with some phrase and see the misspellings, but to no avail. That would be interesting - anyone know links?

[aamar]

It's used as an illustrative example on the "Why Work at Google?" page: http://www.google.com/intl/en/jobs/swe/whygoogle/

I thought at first it might be the source data for some kind of programming puzzle, but searching "link:www.google.com/jobs/britney.html site:google.com" did not immediately reveal it. Upon reflection, a puzzle of that sort seems a bit uncharacteristic.

[josscrowcroft]

That's interesting, but maybe would have been better if they'd discounted the phrases where the user clicked "Show results for [mis-spelled query] instead"

Some of those look like legitimate queries..

[leahculver]

1807 briney spears

Probably just searching for a damn pickle.

[tcarnell]

Actually, it seems these are only the spelling stats for misspelling 'britney' - every single 'spears' is spelt correctly. I was expecting to at least see 'britney speares' listed.

[jcr]

I've always wondered if spelling could be improved through electrical shocks?

[flarg]

Don't overreact! Speaking for myself, I often horrify my sister when I Google for something with a terrible misspelling because sometimes I am a lazy typist; and Google fixes it for me like magic! If only real-life was as easy ;)

[mikemaccana]

Isn't the name ' britney' itself a misspelling?

[mikemaccana]

Some background from WP:

"Brittany is a female given name of French and Latin origins, after Brittany, a region of France...

Brittany is also derived from 'Britannia', a 2nd century Roman goddess."

[cleverjake]

what was the job link to that?

[srehnborg]

Really? - 2 grittney spears

[joshu]

g is above b on my keygoard.

[leif]

damn, I was hoping to see britney spores.

[VBprogrammer]

Oh come on, half those people are typing one handed.

Sorry.