Google Alerts Now Spell Checks the Queries

Lately I’ve been noticing a lot of weird hits coming in via my Google Alerts emails. I’ve dug into it and I think I’ve figured out what’s going on: Google Alerts is spell checking the queries and matching the queries as it would do in a search. This in addition to matching the Alert queries exactly as previously. This new behavior kicked in about a week or 10 days ago.

For example: I keep an alert for [blogsci] because I have a website at blogsci.com. Up till recently, I used to get alerts only when the word "blogsci" was matched in a page. Now, I’m getting Alerts for pages that do not ever mention the word "blogsci" but the spell checked "blog sci". So I get matches for "…blog: sci-fi…". See what happened there?

Another example: I run a website with a domain name of XY.com where X is a word and Y is another word. My Alert is set to match it exactly as [XY]. This was going well until recently when I started getting alerts that match [X Y].

Another example: I have an alert for [cli.gs], my latest web app. I get a lot of spurious alerts for this because it matches [cli gs] which is a very popular combination apparently.

Anyone else seeing this weirdness? Any other interpretations? Thoughts in the comments please!