An idea from elsewhere (don’t want to be seen plagiarising, but also don’t know about the etiquette of referencing someone without asking). Google offer a ‘did you mean to search for xxx’ instead – which is a great idea for a start (why doesn’t our library system offer this?) – but how about ‘did you mean to search in’ function. Often our users search for information in the wrong place (e.g. search for journal article details in the library catalogue). Why not do a background search for the same search terms in some other systems (e.g. a federated search engine), and offer as well as giving search results from the system they have started with, let them know how many hits they would have got if they had searched elsewhere.