Pretty soon...
...Google will know what you are ABOUT to search for...
Google has tweaked its search engine to speed up queries for users who are prone to spelling mishaps. Mountain View said on Friday that it had made three enhancements to help web surfers input their searches more quickly and easily. It has plumped up the automatic correction of misspelled search words to include 31 languages …
Just... don't. Or at least give us the opportunity to turn the auto-correction off.
I tend to search for things with slightly unusual spellings. I often also use French or Spanish search terms. I already get irked by Google asking "did you mean...", or even (on one occasion) deciding that I actually didn't mean to search for "sp_dbcc_faultreport indid", and giving me the results for "sp_dbcc_faultreport india"!
This sounds like it will lead to more of the same. In return for making something easier to use for newbies, we are going to end up with something that is of less use to power users.
Absolutely with you on this. I never understood why Google didn't have a modifier (a la "site:somedomain.com" and so forth) to yield only an exact string match. It would be so useful for hunting down software error-messages and the like - usually this works to some extent with phrase matching, but often it doesn't.
An engine that did this would get a big portion of my queries.