Is Google Too Intuitive?

I don't usually blog about everyday search occurrences of mine, but there was one I had the other day that really had me scratching my head. I've had a feeling for some time that there was a possibility a search engine would get too intuitive - to the point of it missing the intent of a searcher, or even assuming there was a typo when there wasn't.

I was doing some research into industrial photography, specifically looking for Bernd and Hilla Becher's works. They were a German couple who used large format cameras to capture industrial scenes. I couldn't quite recall how to spell the husband's name and ended up searching for "Brend industrial photography."

Google decided, in all its infinite algorithmic wisdom, to return me 10 result pages relating to someone called Brenda. I was shocked, not just to see not one single relevant page to what I was looking for, but more because it didn't ask me if I misspelled it. It seems Google loves to offer its users the famous "Did you mean...." line at the top of your results if it feels you've made a typo. I didn't get that this time. So what did I do? I tried Yahoo! with the original mis-typed query. Sure enough, I had relevant results returned to me and found an informative site at the 3rd result.

Google must have been spying on me, because I tried the same search again a few days later, and found much better results. So I don't know if this speaks more of Google's over-intuitive result pages, or of their lightning fast algorithmic improvements.