It's not Helen of Troy or the assassination of an archduke, but this spelling-bee-worthy 10-cent word also launched a war, the Great Search Engine War of 2011, between Google and Microsoft. Over the past few years, one of Google's primary technical goals has been to improve its search engine for misspellings of unusual queries. It's relatively easy for Google to figure out that you mean "Obama" when you type "Onama." But what about something that people rarely search for -- and that they rarely spell correctly when they do? For a search scientist, that's the beautiful challenge of tarsorrhaphy, a gruesome-sounding surgical procedure.
When Google's search team figured out how to offer the results it would return for tarsorrhaphy after a user typed in "tarsoraphy," it was a quiet-but-important upgrade for the company's most important, and most-taken-for-granted, product. Best of all, it was something that Microsoft's competing and increasingly lauded search engine, Bing, couldn't do.
To read the full, original article click on this link: 7 Ways Larry Page Is Defining Google's Future | Fast Company
Author: Farhad Manjoo
