Did you mean

“Did you mean” is what a search does instead of shrugging. The query came back thin or empty, the index holds a word one or two keystrokes away from what was typed, and rather than reporting the failure the interface names the near miss and offers it. The correction is cheap to compute (edit distance against the terms the index already knows, weighted by how often each is searched for) and it is worth far more than the arithmetic suggests, because the alternative is a reader who concludes the thing they wanted does not exist.

There are two conventions and the difference between them is who decides. The suggestion form leaves the query alone: it shows the results for what was typed, however few, and offers the correction as a link to accept. The substitution form decides for the reader: it runs the corrected query, says so (“Showing results for receive”), and offers the way back (“Search instead for recieve”). Confidence picks between them. A near-certain correction with no results for the literal query earns the substitution, because making someone click to get the only useful answer is a toll. A guess earns the suggestion, because silently answering a question nobody asked is worse than answering the wrong one out loud. Either way the reader must be able to see what was actually searched and get their own words back in one click, which is the part that gets dropped.

The suggestion belongs above the results, not below them, and it has to say both words: the one it ran and the one that was typed. A strip that reads only “Showing results for receive” leaves the reader unsure whether their spelling was wrong or their memory was. Screen readers need the same fact, so the strip is a live region that announces the swap rather than a decoration that quietly appears. On this site no results state is the outcome this is trying to prevent: a typo is the most common reason a list goes empty, so the empty state and the correction are usually built in the same afternoon.

The name comes from the phrasing Google shipped in the early 2000s, and it stuck so firmly that the words are now the name of the pattern in most teams, whichever wording actually appears on screen. Keep it distinct from autocorrect, which rewrites text as it is typed and is not a search behaviour at all, and from a typeahead, which suggests whole queries before the search has run. This one arrives after: it is a repair, not a prediction.