Interestingly enough this caught my attention - so I decided to do a quasi-audit to help out you guys over at EcoStoreInc.com - Check it out.

http://www.derekchew.com/2009/02/04/googe-did-you-mean-data-mining/

What hurts one helps another. There are just as many "SEOs" happy with a feature like this because the top positions are that much more valuable.

Agree and disagree.

But the basis of this is to figure out why this is happening.

As a search user I have already had this new feature bother me more than once for just that reason. Google was wrong, I did not mean something else so I was therefore forced into looking further down the page for the information I searched for. Google's did you mean is wrong to often to add this feature.

Did anyone lose any TRAFFIC? Screw the rankings. What counts is the converting traffic.

How is traffic?

How are conversions?

Google use to suggest that the general term for my website 'supplement Centre' was actually 'supplement Center'... A competitor's web address. It doesnt seem to do this now as it slowly gives our website more value but suggesting a competitor straight away isnt good for business!

Well from the post, it appears that sales decreased - so I would go out on a limb to say traffic decreased too?

Derek, I see where Barry wrote that sales declined, but when I look at the original discussion I see no such indication.

Agreed.

I suppose this would be a good time for the site's owner to chime in :)

Yay! Now I can typo and misspell more than evar! Google will figure out what I"m looking for?!?

Completely agree with Ryan (as a user):Google's did you mean is wrong to often to add this feature.

In so much as it hurts SEOs who try to gain rankings for words/items that users didn't intend to type-in, good riddance! But Google will need to do this carefully. And there may be better ways to do the weeding out.

Similarly when you search for Real Estate India, you can see the Google's News section after third result. This makes my website to drop one more position in the search result and it hurts very badly....

It's the typical case where Google thinks they know better than the user who is sitting in front of the computer and typing in what they really want - but Google tries to read your mind!! :)

This has been going on for quite a while. Different results for different clicks, sometimes on the same query. I blogged about it in June 2008. Click on my name to read the post.

It looks like Google has "learnt" that ray ban or rayban is not synonymous.

So...I'm incline to hypothesize that "Did you mean" feature is largely Google's way to do data-mining for what majority thinks is relevant.

the website in question should optimize for such nuances and get a step ahead of google's did you mean. additionally, as others pointed out, he's way behind the curve and has milked his site a long time without updating the basics of SEO

we are searching for the optimization for our website onlineplots.com which is a real estate web portal for indian property buyers

we are searching for the optimization for our website onlineplots.com which is a real estate web portal for indian property buyers

seo for onlineplots.com search for the indian property buyers , real estate web portal ,rent commercial in india

Google take it from the dictionary for the nearest true spell of the searching phrase. i.e. any wrong phrase was entered in the search box, google check spell and display did you mean suggestion of true spell.