Gmail creator Paul Buchheit on the very first version of Google’s “Did you mean?” feature

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·Nov 3, 2024

One of the earliest kind of magical features that we added was the "did you mean?" Uh, you know, the spell correction. And so that actually comes from originally just my inability to spell. I've never been very good at spelling; my brain doesn't like arbitrary patterns. So, like, when I was in school, math was easy because it's predictable, but spelling always made me struggle.

Um, and so when I started at Google, one of the first features I added was the spell corrector because I was looking at the query logs and I would see that I'm not the only person with this problem. Like, a third of the queries were misspelled or something like that. So it was like the easiest quality win ever was just to fix the spelling.

Wait, wait, so you built the original spelling corrector at Google? Somehow I didn't. Um, I did the first "did you mean?" feature. Um, and so, but I built it just based off of kind of an existing spell corrector library. And then, but it would give really dumb corrections. Like if you typed in "Turbo Tax," it would try to correct it to "turbot axe," turbot being a type of fish.

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Gmail creator Paul Buchheit on the very first version of Google’s “Did you mean?” feature

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