Why Google Wins, Part 145

While browsing Slashdot I saw this article on a Python program which will help you solve a jigsaw puzzle. Which is interesting in its own right, but it contained this:

Hold a puzzle piece up to a webcam, and the display sgiws exactly where in the puzzle the piece belongs.

Ha, ha, "sgiws". I've done that too: one of your hands (the right one in this case) is offset from its proper position on the keyboard and "shows" becomes "sgiws". Then I wondered: is that common on the Web? So I Googled "sgiws". Up came about 50 hits, but at the top of the first page, Google asks:

Did you mean: shows

I knew Google was pretty good at suggesting corrections for garden variety misspellings, but this was the first I'd seen where it suggests corrections for keyboard-offset mistyping. Impressive.

(And, no, the "sgiws" mistyping doesn't seem to be that usual. It's more commonly found in some Unix-style directory paths and foreign-language web pages, I think mostly Welsh.)


Last Modified 2012-10-26 5:36 PM EDT