How Are Misspelled Words Handled?
When a searched term is found to be not present or rarely present in indexed documents, the Coveo Platform looks for terms with close spelling and a significantly higher number of occurrences in the unified index. When such terms are found, the closest most frequent term is suggested as an alternative spelling. The relevance of the suggestions improve with the size of the index as more correctly spelled terms are available for comparison.
Note: The Did you mean algorithm does not try to correct the following:
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Wildcard expressions;
Example: App*
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Terms being 3 characters or less long;
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Terms beginning with a digit.
Example: If you misspell the word excerpt by typing excert in the search box, the Coveo Platform displays a Did you mean message below the search box panel to propose the alternate spelling that you can click to launch the corrected query.
You can also configure the Coveo .NET Front-End search interface to automatically use the corrected query suggestion (see Modifying .NET Search Interface Preferences). In this case, the Coveo Platform automatically corrects the misspelled word in a query before launching the query, but displays a Query was automatically corrected to... message below the search box panel to indicate that an automatic correction was performed.
Example: With the Automatically use corrected query suggestions (did you mean) preference option selected in a .NET search interface , when you misspell the word excerpt by typing excert in the search box, the Coveo Platform automatically replaces the misspelled term by the corrected term in the search box, and displays a Query was automatically corrected to... message below the search box panel.
Note: An administrator may want to better understand how the query correction feature works (see Query Correction Feature).