Friday, August 22, 2008

Firefox's Spell Checker Should Use Google's "Did You Mean" Technology

I am a horrible speller, but hopefully that isn't apparent on this blog since I take full advantage of Firefox's spell checker. When I am composing these blog posts any misspelled words get underlined in red so I can right click on them and fix them up.

Unfortunately, Firefox's suggestions are not particularly good. For example, I misspelled prosperity as propserpity and the suggestions were: Proserpina, Proserpine, propensity, and propinquity. I must misspell words in particularly creative ways for I often find that the correct spelling is not on the list. Sometimes I am off by just one letter and yet it doesn't make the suggestion list.

On the other hand, when you misspell something in a Google search, Google gives you a "Did you mean" suggestion which works amazingly well (worked perfectly on propserpity). I would have to say that it suggests the right word 95% of the time. I don't know how they are able to get it to work so well, but I am always impressed by how it finds the right word with only one suggestion.

I wish Firefox would license this technology and put it into their spell checker or that some add-on developer would create an add-on that puts the "Did you mean" suggestion on the top of the list.

3 comments:

Rebelfish said...

I agree with the "Did You Mean." When I can't remember how to spell proper or scientific names, I just type my best guess into a Google search and see what it thinks I mean.

Fat Knowledge said...

Yeah, the more places that this technology is implemented the better.

Avaviel said...

The same is true with Open Office! When It can't find a word I use the Google spellcheck.

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