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I noticed this a while ago and thought maybe it was just a test, but Google has started auto-correcting without prompting for certain types of misspellings. In the example below, Google simply assumed I meant ’sprint razr’ when I typed ’sprint razor’ — so it’s showing me the results to a search different than the one I entered! Very different results if you search “sprint razor” (same search but with quotes) and slightly different even if you choose sprint AND razor (which isn’t supposed to change the results since “and” is supposed to be treated like a stop word).

I’ve also seen what looked like similar highlighting of variations without actual reordering of results. In the example below, I searched for ‘cingular razer’, and Google’s results highlight both ‘razor’ and ‘razer’.

But I think the highlighting of the search term misspelling in the snippet and title is a separate from auto-correcting search queries.

This is a big step forward in the search engines’ efforts to “think like a user.” Afterall, if a user types ’sprint razor’ he’s not looking to see how many pages use the term ’sprint razor’; he’s more likely looking for the Sprint RAZR product, and that’s what the results reflect.

Although I’m sure continual refinements will need to be made and a lot of assumptions will be incorrect at first, I think this is a step in the right direction in terms of cleaning up the SERPs. If this trend continues, it will help businesses avoid having to optimize for common misspellings of their keywords in addition to their regular target search phrases. Even better, it means Google will stop rewarding sites that don’t spell things correctly.