It’s well known Google will try and correct your spelling, to make sure you’re actually getting accurate results, but now the search engine may be taking things a step further. You may find that Google is starting to check your grammar as well.
Google has just announced the new grammar check feature, which will use AI to analyze your search terms and correct you if you make some sort of mistake. Assuming you’re using English, since the feature isn’t available in other languages right now.
There are some caveats to this feature, though. The first is Google has a disclaimer noting that checked grammar may not be 100% accurate — especially with partial sentences. Which is pretty much what the search giant has been saying about all these kinds of AI-powered features.
The other is that search needs to be able to tell that you want your grammar checked — which usually means adding “grammar check” at the end of your sentence. Occasionally Google will be able to figure out you need a check by itself, but outright stating your intentions are the only guaranteed way to do it.
We gave grammar check a few sample sentences, just to see what kind of corrections we'd end up getting. Above you can see one example, where we typed "you is reading toms guide", which Google corrected to "You are reading Tom's Guide" — swapping out the is for are, and capitalizing "Tom".
Though since "guide" isn't a proper noun most of the time, Google forgot to capitalize the G. Similarly "my name are tom" was changed to "My name is Tom"
Google can get confused rather easily, though. Asking "what best iphone grammar check" produced results about the best grammar checking apps for iPhone. Likewise, typing in "google will help you to write proper grammar check" brought up news about the grammar check feature.
Swapping grammar check to the start of the sentence did nothing to change the results. That shows that the feature needs some fine-tuning, and potentially a more definitive way of asking Google to check your grammar. Or it may just be that such simple search terms are so common, Google doesn't recognize it as a sentence.
Grammar check has already started rolling out, but it doesn’t always work the way you might hope — even with the “grammar check” command. However, Google does note the tool won’t operate if “the content might be in violation of Google Search’s overall policies or these policies for Search features.” According to Google’s blog post this includes content that’s medical, harassing, hateful, dangerous, sexually explicit, terrorist, violent, or features any kind of profanity.
This kind of tool is only going to appeal to a certain group of people in its current state. Those of you that aren’t sure about how a sentence should be written, and need some kind of confirmation as to whether it is or not. It probably won’t be going so far as to try and educate people when they type in bizarre, poorly written search terms.
Still, being able to check the grammar of a few standalone sentences with Google is a heck of a lot simpler than using a different service — such as Grammarly. Especially since, in our brief time tinkering with grammar check, it also seems to work from the Chrome address bar — rather than the Google search bar itself.
