Google CSE - Any way to disable "Did you mean"?

[tedster]

This problem has been floated to me, and I must admit I'm stymied. Hoping someone here has relevant experience.

In a Google Custom Search Engine (CSE) the "Did you mean" functionality can be quite problematic for some websites, suggesting completely irrelevant choices or even a direct competitor - possibly thanks to Google's recently upgraded semantic processing.

So is there a way for a CSE to turn off that feature? There is a block list for specific sites, but that's not the same as not stopping the suggested search terms altogether.

There's an almost exact version of this question on Google's CSE Help Forum [google.com], bit so far no response there from a Google person.

[netmeg]

Don't know the answer, but sure would like to. I have a boatload of CSEs.

[lucy24]

Are you talking about the ones where they ask "Did you mean X?" or the ones where they quietly assume you meant X, so you have to do the ### search twice? (Thank you, google, but if I had meant "sublusive" I would not have asked for "sublusiut". That's not a plausible misspelling. And if I had wanted sites in English, I would not have explicitly selected German, thanks all the same.)

This doesn't exactly answer the question, but if you default to "Advanced Search" (I've got it in my bookmarks bar) you can use the "exact phrase" line-- it works for single words too-- instead of having to type quotation marks. They'll still ask if you meant X, but only after searching for the text you actually entered. It does save some exasperation.

[tedster]

Thanks for the observation - it's helpful for the search user.

In this case, the exasperation belongs mostly to the site owner, not just to the search user. They're looking for a way to avoid the "asking" altogether, because there are some common occurrences in their market niche where those suggestions are just way out of line.