If I am reading you correctly, then it's been like it for a few months that I am aware of.

I've never seen this red question WITHIN the drop-down suggestions - only below the box on the actual results page.

I saw "Did you mean" withing the suggestions for the first time earlier today. G's making it even harder to ignore.

Definetely within drop down suggestion - and with red letters. It kind of flashes in/out as you type the same way the 'normal' Google suggest does. It kind of looks like this in Google search box:


+---------------------------------------------+
aaaaaaaa bbbb^ ccccccccc
+---------------------------------------------+
Did you mean: aaaaaaaa bbbbbbbb ccccccccc
+---------------------------------------------+

Where the top line is search box and second line is dropdown. The ^ is where the cursor is, and if not expected letter is typed at ^ position, then the drop-down would close or change into 'usual' Google suggestion pattern, but may show again if Google has "thought of" something else that could offer as "Did you mean" as you progress with letters. It sticks out because "Did you mean" uses red font.

Happens on Google.com, but not on Google.co.uk for the same keyword phrase.

I've never seen this red question WITHIN the drop-down suggestions - only below the box on the actual results page.

I have seen it and it's exactly what I was referring to when I discussed the "extrememly aggressive" spell suggestions in the June SERPs update thread [webmasterworld.com]....

quoting from my June 15, 2010 msg #:4153153...

In relation to the disambiguation, I should note, Google announced a new "feature" in the week of June 6...

Spelling Corrections in Suggest
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/06/this-week-in-search-6610.html [googleblog.blogspot.com].

My emphasis below...

This week we launched an update that makes Google Suggest even more intuitive and simple. If you're typing a query for which there are no search completions to offer, and yet some of your search terms do seem to be misspelled, Google Suggest will now offer a "Did you mean" suggestion for your query—giving you an option to correct your spelling right away and get on with your search. These spelling suggestions already exist on the results page, but by moving them to an earlier point in the search process, we hope we've made it faster and easier to get to the results you're looking for.

For those who haven't encountered the feature, it's extremely aggressive. When I was searching for a friend's name that was a rare combination of first and last name spellings on the web, Suggest intruded a lot, but still recognized... when I clicked the Search button... that there were "search completions" in the several pages that listed my friend as she spells her name.

I've been meaning to follow up on this. While the feature has been backed off quite a bit, it apparently hasn't entirely gone away.

As I was seeing it, the red "Did you mean?" would pop up as queries were being typed, on searches where there was a common alternative spelling and where the misspelling occurred in less than 300 or so instances on the web. Where there was no common alternative, Suggest appeared to let it go. Search frequency also apparently entered into this. And on computers where users were signed in and searched the less common spelling frequently, the red "Did you mean?" didn't pop up.

Slightly off topic, but related... On the specific tumbler search we were discussing in the Update thread, which has since been reported as fixed, it was only "fixed" in the sense that our discussion skewed the usage of the phrase on the web quite a bit.

After it was discussed here, the tumbler phrase has been targeted or simply included in a whole bunch of sites, and the search has become so common that it not only isn't rejected by Google Suggest, but it actually is suggested by Google Suggest. ;)

At the time we originally discussed it, the exact phrase occurred on the web only 9 times. Google now reports 55 matches for the exact phrase and filters for dupes at around 15 or so results.

An aspect of this that perhaps contains some clues about how Google displays its index... there are (or were) in fact many more exact matches for the tumbler phrase along the way. Soon after the phrase was mentioned here, Google reported something like 370 exact matches, many buried in some really tacky "collage" pages. Apparently these have now been removed from the reported index... but unless the pages themselves are gone, they're still around somewhere, just not shown.

aakk9999. I didn't read you correctly. Sorry.
Yes, this is a new thing. I just spotted it on another phrase.

The one I was thinking about is fairly similar, but alive for a while.

Yea, like Robert said, this is about 1.5 months old now and only comes up in very limited types of queries.

It's probably worth noting that in the example discussed in the Update thread, Google was suggesting the spelling correction, but, if you ignored it, in some cases Google would revise your query anyway and would return results for the "corrected" spelling, along with a message...

Showing results for great widgets. Search instead for great widgots

I'm seeing this happen now with a phrase I entered that's an intentional misspelling of a client phrase.

If you click on the "Search instead for great widgots", you'll get a very interesting set of results. It doesn't match the misspelling... all of the spellings are correct, and "great widgots" aren't to be found... and Google returns a set of results for great widgets that includes much more stemming, more Universal results, and in general a broader range of site types than in a normal serp.

In some ways, this set of results looks as if this is what Google would prefer to return if it were not constrained by the exact vocabulary match, and were instead simply returning a broad set of results covering the field suggested by the query. I haven't yet explored this deeply, but it appears the approach might actually be an interesting research tool.

If you enter the misspelling "great widgots" in quotes, Google, in this test search, shows roughly 150 results it says match the query. It first displays the top two or three results that it would show if the search were for the correct spelling, and then, beneath a horizontal rule separating the sets of results, shows exact matches for the misspelling, ie...

Results for: "great widgots"

In this particular search, there's clearly not a page of value in the bunch. Many are "collage" spam (as I've begun to call it)... collections of snippets. Some are tagged with malware warnings by Norton Site Safety. In past weeks, I'd seen the number of pages shown for this quoted query to be roughly twice the 150 Google is showing now... and again, it could be that Google has the rest indexed somewhere but just sees no point in returning them, or else that the extra pages are simply gone.

No doubt best for most users. But when you want to research arcane vocabulary, or when Google goofs up with this feature, it can get really annoying. I think they've mostly backed it off by now with regard to useful results.