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Using Google as a Spell Checker
Believe it or not, I actually was the winner of the 4th grade spelling bee at my elementary school. Since then, I haven’t ever won any sort of spelling competition. That’s why Google comes in handy… a lot!
Let’s say you’re trying to write a letter by hand to somebody and you can’t remember how to spell a certain word. What do you do? Well, you could look it up in a dictionary, or start up Microsoft Word and type in the word and run spell check, or… You could use Google to spell check the word for you!
Let’s try one of the longest words in the English language: antidisestablishmentarianism. You can type something into the Google search bar that is remotely similar to the world you are trying to spell, and more often than not, Google will say, at the top of the search results:
Did you mean: [Proper spelling of word here]
Check out the screen shot below to see this in action.
Chances are you’ll never want to spell antidisestablishmentarianism. However, one of the 100 most misspelled words in the English Language is daiquiri. Now, let’s try to throw two words at Google that are spelled wrong: strawberry and daiquiri. Check out what happens:
Not only did Google correct the spelling of both my words, it actually knew that I was trying to spell daiquiri even when I didn’t include any of the three i’s in my misspelled version. Plus, I can take comfort in knowing that 42 people spelled strawberry and daiquiri wrong on their webpages at some point — even Carlos, a 22 year old male from The Loma, California. However, it looks like he had an excuse for misspelling it since he “sure did [have] too much strawbery daquary..heehee.”
If you aren’t amazed yet by the power that Google has in spell checking, look at the next screenshot where I type in the following phrase into a Google search box:
kan youu tel mee howw tu spel wurds?
Hopefully nobody would knowingly type this into Google, but if they did, Google would let them know in a very polite way that perhaps they had spelled all eight words they typed incorrectly. They could also rest assured knowing that Target.com is interested in selling to phonetically challenged people like themselves.
Drawbacks
Of course Google isn’t perfect. If a lot of people have misspelled certain words and they appear a lot on the internet, then Google may think that it is a proper way to spell that word and hence will not suggest another way to spell a misspelled word.
However, it appears that Google has changed their algorithm as the frequency of this occurring isn’t nearly as often as it was when this feature was first implemented. If you can find any occurrences of this, let me know in the comments section below.
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2 Responses to “Using Google as a Spell Checker”
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Using Google as a spell checker is one of the most uneco-friendly things you can do!
Each Google search apparently uses enough energy to boil 1-2 kettles of water as their super-fast servers use enormous amounts of energy!
Use your local spell checker; e.g. I am using Ms Word right now, or use a dictionary installed on your computer or if you use the Firefox browser, there are free dictionary add-ons in a number of languages you can use when writing webmail or filling in forms, posting replys, etc…
In the past, I used Google to check spellings as I also feel that spelling correctly is very important, but there are many more energy efficient ways of doing it.
Changing unconscious bad habits make a difference.
Please post your thoughts on my reply.
Google is boiling 1-2 cups water during every search?! That sounds like the most eco-friendly thing a company could do! Boiling water is one of the best ways to purify water in third-world countries. Google must be the only company I can think of that is helping poor, starving children in Africa.
And speaking of things that are not eco-friendly, do you realize how many trees are killed each year to make paper dictionaries?! The number is so horrible, I can’t even bear to think of it.
If left between a choice of using Google for spell-check (and helping African children get clean drinking water) or searching through a paper dictionary (and thus killing endangered species in South American rain-forests), I’m going to choose Google!