3 ms·

When I search Worldle, Google search returns Wordle, but below it shows: "Showing results for wordle. Search instead for worldle" If I click the link for "world

• shoo 5y ago
  same feature is often very helpful when you tyop or missspell a word. Some google system will be crunching the odds on P(X=wordle | Y=worldle) / P(X=worldle | Y=worldle) where Y := observed sequence of characters the user typed in the box X := user's intended search term (unobserved) if we set priors on the intended search term from observed frequency in pages indexed by google, we get something like P(X=wordle) : 1.4e9 / Z P(X=worldle): 3.2e6 / Z where Z is the number of words in the internet. Bayes theorem gives P(X=wordle | Y=worldle) P(Y=worldle | X=wordle) P(X=wordle) ----------------------- = ---------------------------------- P(X=worldle | Y=worldle) P(Y=worldle | X=worldle) P(X=worldle) So if there's a 1/400 or higher chance that a user accidentally adds an extra L when trying to key in "wordle", and hits enter anyway, then the expression on the right will evaluate to > 1 which means we should infer the user actually meant X="wordle" even though they keyed in Y="worldle"