Tarsorrhaphy.
It’s not Helen of Troy or the assassination of an archduke, but this spelling-bee-worthy 10-cent word also launched a war, the Great Search Engine War of 2011, between Google and Microsoft. Over the past few years, one of Google’s primary technical goals has been to improve its search engine for misspellings of unusual queries. It’s relatively easy for Google to figure out that you mean “Obama” when you type “Onama.” But what about something that people rarely search for — and that they rarely spell correctly when they do? For a search scientist, that’s the beautiful challenge of tarsorrhaphy, a gruesome-sounding surgical procedure.
When Google’s search team figured out how to offer the results it would return for tarsorrhaphy after a user typed in “tarsoraphy,” it was a quiet-but-important upgrade for the company’s most important, and most-taken-for-granted, product. Best of all, it was something that Microsoft’s competing and increasingly lauded search engine, Bing, couldn’t do.
“But then we noticed something very puzzling,” says Amit Singhal, the jovial head of Google’s search-ranking team. Just a few weeks later, Bing seemingly had the same breakthrough with the same word:
It offered the identical top result as Google for “tarsoraphy.” Over the following months, Singhal’s team saw a pattern. “We’d log an improvement,” he says when we meet in a pastel-colored conference room on the second story of Building 43, central command of the Googleplex, “and a few weeks later, our best result would start showing up on Bing.”
