June 17, 2004

Mysterious Google

Query: antonym
Helpful Google: Did you mean: synonym

The relation is not symmetrical. A query for synonym just gives the list of results, with no helpful suggestion that you might mean antonym. This probably has something to do with the fact that there are 1,230,000 hits for synonym, and only 78,900 for antonym. However, more is going on than just Levenshtein distance and hit counts, since meronym, with the same edit distance and only 1,680 hits, also fails to get any helpful "did you mean" suggestion.

[initial observation from a note at SC's site]

Posted by Mark Liberman at June 17, 2004 12:25 PM