Google as a SpellChecker

I just downloaded the latest version of the Google Toolbar plug-in for my browser (I.E. only at this stage unfortunately). Among the few additional features is the new SpellCheck function that checks the spellings of entries you make into forms on web pages. This is a damn handy feature for me considering I run an editing and proofreading business. My writing is constantly scrutinised by readers whenever I’m promoting my business and I’m certainly not perfect, I do make spelling and grammar mistakes. People just love to point them out to me, it gives them a perverse pleasure. I even once had a fellow offer to show me where a spelling mistake was on my website in exchange for $100 which he promised he would give to charity. How nice of him.

You may not realise but the Google spellchecker is quite a revolutionary piece of software itself born out of the unique indexing method Google uses. In the past spell-checking has been handled by simply comparing how a word is spelt against a list of words. If there is no match then it flags the word as incorrect. Google goes one step further. It checks it’s index of the web and offers you what it thinks would be the correct spelling based on how the whole Internet spells the word, or at least Google’s index of the web (incidentally this is probably not even close to half of the entire amount of web pages out there, but who’s counting). So rather than checking against a single index Google compares how millions and millions of other people are spelling the word and uses the context of your writing (the words around the misspelled word) to help offer corrections. Hence you get those really handy spelling correction questions from Google whenever you mistype a search request into Google. Neat hey.