4 ms·

Google's spell checker still is a major feat of software engineering ;-) It must handle every language, handle new words constantly being coined, have low enoug

by lacker 6y ago

Google's spell checker still is a major feat of software engineering ;-) It must handle every language, handle new words constantly being coined, have low enough latency and high enough throughput to run it on every web search. (Well, caching probably solves 2/3 of traffic.)

google234123 6y ago
It's also present in auto complete
- lacker 6y ago
  True - that's even more requests per second than search is!
SulfurHexaFluri 6y ago
I find googles spell checking to be the best in the world. Google search is where I go when local spell checkers failed.
- sgc 6y ago
  Their google search spellchecker is good, but it's ironic that their android / keyboard spell checker is quite literally the worst I have ever used. Years in and it's maybe 5% as accurate as aspell.
- zinekeller 6y ago
  I dunno, really. It is much better than Word on English, but it is laughable when I jumble several languages on a single document, and doesn't handle some laguages that relies on code-switching. At least Word knows its boundaries.
jeroenhd 6y ago
While it's not bad, it's not that great a universal tool either. My native language makes use of a lot of compound words and Google's spell checker often gets confused when I combine words according to the standard grammar. I can see and understand the technical limitations, but tools like Microsoft Word seem to do a much better job than Google's spell checker, even in things like Google Docs. Google search will often suggest splitting up words and sometimes even does it transparently, which can give entirely wrong results because suddenly Google matches words across a sentence instead of specific compound words. It's kind of frustrating to have to resort to quotation marks for some single-word search terms. I get the feeling Google's spell checker doesn't check spelling, it just tweaks the input until it manages to find more results. Not quite the same, because a lot of "fixes" often have entirely different meanings in my experience.
- not2b 6y ago
  Well, yes, it has to work that way to handle searches for new companies that chose their name based on some non-word with an available domain. If someone types "nvidea" they probably mean "nvidia", and Google doesn't handle that with a dictionary. Same for the handles of social media celebrities.
- lacker 6y ago
  Yeah, exactly! - this is why building the perfect spell checker is still a challenging and interesting engineering problem, in 2020. The nature of misspelling varies from language to language, especially with non-letter-based languages like CJK, or with input methods that lead to different sorts of typos than a regular keyboard. Out of curiosity, what is your native language, Dutch? Can you give an example of something that Google’s spell checker screws up?
  - berkes 6y ago
    I'm Dutch, and here are some funny things suggested wrong by spellcheckers: * hoofdaannemer - hoofd aannemer : main contracter - person who takes heads * wegomlegging - weg om legging : road closure, a road around a legging(pants) * dagverse vis - dag verse vis : catch of the day - goodbye, fresh fish This twitter has many such errors in the wild. https://mobile.twitter.com/spatiegebruik https://mobile.twitter.com/spatiegebruik Not all spellcheckers suggest it wrong, but almost all that rely on statistics, will get it wrong: hoofdaannemer (or hoofdanything), will occur far less than hoofd or aannemer. This, I fear, is forming our language use. As people rely on tech, they'll follow the suggestions and wrong use of space will turn an actual problem. Edit: formatting.
  - kiwijamo 6y ago
    German is another one that seems to match the description.
- ath92 6y ago
  This exactly. I've often wondered if the default spell checkers that come with phones nowadays are slowly changing the language itself. If Google doesn't fix these issues in the nearish future, an entire generation will grow up with a device that tells them the spelling they learnt in school is wrong. And with so many people just accepting Google's anti-compound spelling as correct, many people will be mostly exposed to a version of their language with more spaces, and it'll start to "feel" right to them.
lizardmancan 6y ago
i remember suggesting they make just one in stead of one for each product. the gmail was way ahead of the rest at the time
smt1 6y ago
That's true, although in effect, you can 'just' see it as a creative way to meta-optimize google to translate neologisms to do your bidding (hopefully ethical, in fact, it's a very effective way to intentionally cause effects). For example, I think people have had huge type understanding entropy, energy, power, transmission, information, etc with all of the neologisms that people have coined (or converted into fiat currency, or concentrations of power or information, or net 0 carbon obligations vPPAs like google has). But I gotta say, isn't it a bit exergy-poverty potentiating and lack of laser focus on how fundamental heat transference actually works, both in vivo (important for targeted medicine), in silico (needed to improve the probability of quantum error rate and controllability of decoherence) and in environment (especially with the carbon cycle). This has frequently lead to anti-trust issues in the past, and maybe too much regulatory capture. The funny thing is that you can metabolize google (and the generalized polyad business pattern pathogen) with hydromel of work to be stolen by outputting work over a distributed work stealing queue (for example, outputting stuff into a private distributed peer to peer distributed version of git, like the laconically named https://fossil-scm.org/home/doc/trunk/www/index.wiki https://fossil-scm.org/home/doc/trunk/www/index.wiki). You can in fact, intentionally skew (or ideate euler or complex-dims of spinor space) words to bias things (this would be traditionally a stein encoding over a homogenous linear space), by analyzing the ROC curve of a virtualized Google flattened to VC-dims, then pushforwarding societal pathologies (can be interpreted as a failure to recognize tragedy of the commons, or failure to invest, spend time on, or be incentivized to think about the over-commercalization of the www, which was certainly not the original intent @ CERN etc. Since google has become over reliant on combinatorial algorithms and things that relate to some encoding of numbers, you can re-discreetly digitalize many logarithms that encode to transcode network-theoretic online modulated wavetrains of datums of infos to be "lifted" up into their internal servers, especially due to the implications of the CCPA and GDPR, it's still fairly trivial to abstractly reinterpret '0' as transience using more raw logical prims or much more complicated physical models but shouldn't come to a surprise are much more stable fundamentally when you are modeling things in the digital world. Probably any one set of services (or people) that have too much digital service providing digital presence may quixotically have destabilizing disequilibria of effects. Not that I think google hasn't immensely positive world good over the long run, they've just spread themselves too thin, when one entity becomes "the truth" but might not have everyone's interests aligned (in a semantic meaningful way), it's very much prone to abuse, especially when people become the products in an unethical fashion. Not too dissimilar to that of Facebook.
matsemann 6y ago
I feel it's more statistics based than true spellchecking? At least I often feel that it wants to rewrite my sentences to something completely different because what I'm searching/writing is uncommon but similar to a more common word.

by lacker 6y ago

google234123 6y ago

It's also present in auto complete

lacker 6y ago
True - that's even more requests per second than search is!

SulfurHexaFluri 6y ago

I find googles spell checking to be the best in the world. Google search is where I go when local spell checkers failed.

sgc 6y ago
Their google search spellchecker is good, but it's ironic that their android / keyboard spell checker is quite literally the worst I have ever used. Years in and it's maybe 5% as accurate as aspell.
zinekeller 6y ago
I dunno, really. It is much better than Word on English, but it is laughable when I jumble several languages on a single document, and doesn't handle some laguages that relies on code-switching. At least Word knows its boundaries.

jeroenhd 6y ago

While it's not bad, it's not that great a universal tool either. My native language makes use of a lot of compound words and Google's spell checker often gets confused when I combine words according to the standard grammar. I can see and understand the technical limitations, but tools like Microsoft Word seem to do a much better job than Google's spell checker, even in things like Google Docs. Google search will often suggest splitting up words and sometimes even does it transparently, which can give entirely wrong results because suddenly Google matches words across a sentence instead of specific compound words. It's kind of frustrating to have to resort to quotation marks for some single-word search terms. I get the feeling Google's spell checker doesn't check spelling, it just tweaks the input until it manages to find more results. Not quite the same, because a lot of "fixes" often have entirely different meanings in my experience.

not2b 6y ago
Well, yes, it has to work that way to handle searches for new companies that chose their name based on some non-word with an available domain. If someone types "nvidea" they probably mean "nvidia", and Google doesn't handle that with a dictionary. Same for the handles of social media celebrities.
lacker 6y ago
Yeah, exactly! - this is why building the perfect spell checker is still a challenging and interesting engineering problem, in 2020. The nature of misspelling varies from language to language, especially with non-letter-based languages like CJK, or with input methods that lead to different sorts of typos than a regular keyboard. Out of curiosity, what is your native language, Dutch? Can you give an example of something that Google’s spell checker screws up?
- berkes 6y ago
  I'm Dutch, and here are some funny things suggested wrong by spellcheckers: * hoofdaannemer - hoofd aannemer : main contracter - person who takes heads * wegomlegging - weg om legging : road closure, a road around a legging(pants) * dagverse vis - dag verse vis : catch of the day - goodbye, fresh fish This twitter has many such errors in the wild. https://mobile.twitter.com/spatiegebruik https://mobile.twitter.com/spatiegebruik Not all spellcheckers suggest it wrong, but almost all that rely on statistics, will get it wrong: hoofdaannemer (or hoofdanything), will occur far less than hoofd or aannemer. This, I fear, is forming our language use. As people rely on tech, they'll follow the suggestions and wrong use of space will turn an actual problem. Edit: formatting.
- kiwijamo 6y ago
  German is another one that seems to match the description.
ath92 6y ago
This exactly. I've often wondered if the default spell checkers that come with phones nowadays are slowly changing the language itself. If Google doesn't fix these issues in the nearish future, an entire generation will grow up with a device that tells them the spelling they learnt in school is wrong. And with so many people just accepting Google's anti-compound spelling as correct, many people will be mostly exposed to a version of their language with more spaces, and it'll start to "feel" right to them.

lizardmancan 6y ago

i remember suggesting they make just one in stead of one for each product. the gmail was way ahead of the rest at the time

smt1 6y ago

That's true, although in effect, you can 'just' see it as a creative way to meta-optimize google to translate neologisms to do your bidding (hopefully ethical, in fact, it's a very effective way to intentionally cause effects). For example, I think people have had huge type understanding entropy, energy, power, transmission, information, etc with all of the neologisms that people have coined (or converted into fiat currency, or concentrations of power or information, or net 0 carbon obligations vPPAs like google has). But I gotta say, isn't it a bit exergy-poverty potentiating and lack of laser focus on how fundamental heat transference actually works, both in vivo (important for targeted medicine), in silico (needed to improve the probability of quantum error rate and controllability of decoherence) and in environment (especially with the carbon cycle). This has frequently lead to anti-trust issues in the past, and maybe too much regulatory capture. The funny thing is that you can metabolize google (and the generalized polyad business pattern pathogen) with hydromel of work to be stolen by outputting work over a distributed work stealing queue (for example, outputting stuff into a private distributed peer to peer distributed version of git, like the laconically named https://fossil-scm.org/home/doc/trunk/www/index.wiki https://fossil-scm.org/home/doc/trunk/www/index.wiki). You can in fact, intentionally skew (or ideate euler or complex-dims of spinor space) words to bias things (this would be traditionally a stein encoding over a homogenous linear space), by analyzing the ROC curve of a virtualized Google flattened to VC-dims, then pushforwarding societal pathologies (can be interpreted as a failure to recognize tragedy of the commons, or failure to invest, spend time on, or be incentivized to think about the over-commercalization of the www, which was certainly not the original intent @ CERN etc. Since google has become over reliant on combinatorial algorithms and things that relate to some encoding of numbers, you can re-discreetly digitalize many logarithms that encode to transcode network-theoretic online modulated wavetrains of datums of infos to be "lifted" up into their internal servers, especially due to the implications of the CCPA and GDPR, it's still fairly trivial to abstractly reinterpret '0' as transience using more raw logical prims or much more complicated physical models but shouldn't come to a surprise are much more stable fundamentally when you are modeling things in the digital world. Probably any one set of services (or people) that have too much digital service providing digital presence may quixotically have destabilizing disequilibria of effects. Not that I think google hasn't immensely positive world good over the long run, they've just spread themselves too thin, when one entity becomes "the truth" but might not have everyone's interests aligned (in a semantic meaningful way), it's very much prone to abuse, especially when people become the products in an unethical fashion. Not too dissimilar to that of Facebook.

matsemann 6y ago

I feel it's more statistics based than true spellchecking? At least I often feel that it wants to rewrite my sentences to something completely different because what I'm searching/writing is uncommon but similar to a more common word.