Usng Google’s “Did you mean?” Feature as a Better Spell Cheker
Posted on January 20, 2008
Over the years I’ve used Dictionary.com to spell-check the odd word here and there. Recently however I’ve started using Google’s “Did you mean?” feature as my official spell-checker.
Most people have used Google’s “Did you mean?” feature even without knowing it. It works very simply - if you do a Google search on a misspelled word, you’ll most likely be asked, “Did you mean: correctly_spelled_word“. This feature wasn’t built as a spell-checker per-se (in other words, the audience for this feature isn’t generally people looking up the proper spelling of words but rather the person who incorrectly types a search term. Recognizing that the search term is spelled incorrectly (which would return poor results) Google suggests the proper spelling so you can get the results you expect.However, there’s no reason that “Did you mean?” can’t be used directly as a spell checker, and that’s exactly how I use it now. I like it better than the dictionary sites because a) I get just the results I want (the correctly spelled word), b) the results are nearly instant since I have a Google search box just a single click or keystroke away and c) most dictionary sites are built to define words that you spell correctly, not correct incorrectly spelled words (therefore, you end up typing in the incorrectly spelled word several times in trial and error mode until you get the answer you’re looking for).Give it a try. Go to Google and type in an incorrectly spelled word or search phase and you should get a “Did you mean?” suggestion.
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The “Did you mean?” feature is an algorithm decision based on search popularity and keyword occurrences on the internet.
I love it. It’s a fantastic tool for spell check but beware you might find popularized words that don’t officially exist in dictionary or phrases that are bias. Google used to return “Did you mean: He invented” when you search for “She invented”. They manually corrected it after people complained.
:)
[…] “Did you mean: (a more common spelling)?” Even though there are people who find the spell checker feature helpful, some are […]
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Being that this is just a popular search algorithm can I recommend using “define:speling” That way it will not only look for the proper spelling of the word but you can also double check the accuracy of the correct by confirming that the definition is the one you were looking for in the first place.
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