Seems like there’s no stopping Microsoft Live Search from improving on its search features. After last week’s announcement on the final round of improvements on its Live Search, the Live Search blog announces two new features of Live Search that is definitely very useful. These new features are AutoSpell Correction and Stemming.
The AutoSpell Correction is an intelligent improvement on Live Search. It identifies misspelled search term and display search results based on the corrected search term. So, instead of giving a link with the correct spelling of the search term as the anchor link, Live Search instead determines the misspelled search term and conducts search based on what it “thinks” is the correct spelling of the search terms.
So for example if your search term is Paparazzi and you typed in Papparazi on the search box, Live Search will give you search results based on Paparazzi as the correct term. This feature saves users time because instead of having to click another link, the search engine just displays the results connected to the correct search terms.
As for the stemming feature. Microsoft Live Search matches the search term with the root of the word. So, when a user searches for engine, Live Search will automatically crawls its index to get relevant results using both engine and engines as the search term. The smart thing about Live Search’s stemming feature is that it analyzes the context of the search term so as not to confuse its meaning with similar sounding and spelled search terms.
