Yes. It's changed a lot recently, to the point that I made a whingey blog post about it: http://www.cederman.com/2009/09/google-continues-to-disappoi...
Hey Tim, your blog post mentioned the [recency microsoft word misspelled] query. The way I normally check if a word is valid is just do a query for the word, e.g. [recency]. In the top right we show the phrase "Results 1 - 10 of about 2,910,000 for recency" and "recency" will be a hyperlink to a dictionary definition if we recognize that as a valid dictionary word. Looking at the number of results is a good signal to…
I actually did a search on "recency" first, and Google didn't correct me and the first hits were a couple of dictionary entries, which is why I searched for the longer query. I don't know why, but I guess I figured there might be a blog post perhaps complaining about Word lacking common dictionary words and marking them as misspelled. In hindsight, including "recency" in the query was silly, but I'd prefer to get nothing back instead of Google assuming I want something else, which is the issue I was trying to highlight.
I agree that the suggestion of "red room st lucia" is a good one, and it helped me find what I was looking for! However the problem I was trying to show was Google's new approach at suggesting a first hit without search terms you've entered. As another example, I was trying to find my old (and embarrassing!) Geocities page recently, so I searched for [tim cederman geocities] and the first hit was my own blog.