The Google gurus and engineers have been busy. Google announced not one – not two – but three enhancements to help users input searches more quickly and easily.

Google Suggest Tailored to Regions in the U.S

Pandu Nayak, a member of Google’s technical staff said, “Last year we launched localized Google Suggest by country, offering relevant popular search queries tailored for different regions. However, just as people in the U.K. often look for different things than people in U.S., we’ve found that people in Seattle tend to look for different things than people in Dallas. So last week, we rolled out a version of Google Suggest that is tailored to specific metro areas in the U.S.”

The “Nine Nations of North America” is a book that was written in 1981 by Joel Garreau and Google has apparently based the newest “Google Suggest” on that author’s observations.

Google’s English Spelling System in the U.S.

Google has always offered correct spelling suggestions with its “Did you mean.” But now there’s more – a lot more. One of the most frequent searches on Google is for people – all kinds of people. The problem is there are many variations of spellings for sir names.

Google’s new technology is based on the idea that people often know something else about the person besides the approximate spelling of his or her name.

Mr. Nayak explains, “People often include other terms such as ‘composer’ or ‘lawyer sparta wisconsin’ in their search query, which provides valuable context to help us narrow the range of possibilities for the spelling correction. We use these additional descriptive words to offer you better suggestions.”

Google’s “Auto Correction”

Another new improvement to Google’s spelling system is called “Auto Correction.” Now if you mistype a search term – say, “airpot” rather than “airport” – Google skips the “Did you mean” part and takes you directly to the search results for “airport.”

So how do these Google enhancements affect you as an affiliate marketer?

Good question, and we need more information before we can give a definitive answer. But basically, it appears that you need to check what Google Suggest suggests before optimizing for synonyms as well as for misspellings of keywords.