Legal Research

I?m Like the Northwest Mounties

By Simon Fodden

♬ ‘Cause I’ve been searching, oh yeah, searching,
My goodness, searching every which a-way. Yeah. Yeah.
But I’m like the Northwest Mounties,
You know I’ll bring her in some day. ♪♪
[The Coasters, Searchin' by Jerry Lieber & Mike Stoller]

A blog post this morning about a new feature on Google got me thinking about spelling and searching. Google’s Suggest will now offer searchers different suggestions depending upon their locations within the U.S. Thus, to use their example, someone in San Francisco who searches for “bart” will be taken to be searching for the Bay Area Rapid Transit rather than Bart Simpson.

All well and good, and, as with such things, likely to make its way north in due course.

But, I wondered, can “smart Google” handle something even more basic — and much more important to Canadians and, particularly, Canadian bloggers? I’m talking about spelling variants. You know, the “color / colour” thing and “program / programme” or “traveler / traveller” and “catalog / catalogue.” (There’s a partial list of this sort of thing here.) A simple test shows that the answer is no.

Run a search on [colour] in google.ca and I think you’ll find that results with “color” alone do not show up at all in the first 100. Now, more important, run a search on [color]. You’ll get a completely different set of results, one in which, for the first 100, no result contains “colour” alone.

This makes no sense. The two spellings represent the same word, or meaning, if you prefer. How odd that Google doesn’t use a taxonomist’s thesaurus that at least makes spelling variants equivalent terms. Not only is this lacking in sense, it also is a headache for bloggers. Here on Slaw, we’re read in the United States and in England, for instance, as well as in our home country. We’d want our American readers to be able to find articles we’ve run that make use of Canadian spellings; if a key term is spelled in a non-American way, the search would fail to bring us up.

Mind you, Slaw itself doesn’t have a table of equivalent spellings enabling a site-wide search to bring up results from equivalents. (I’m looking around for such a WordPress improvement. Let me know if you have suggestions.) But we’re not as big as Google yet. That’s my excuse.

Fortunately, we deal a lot in legal terminology, which doesn’t seem too burdened by spelling variants. But still…

Oh, and apologies to Dave Bilinsky, whose schtick the music-quote is.

Full post as published by Slaw.ca on April 17, 2010 (boomark / email).