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Google Spell goes down and no one notices
- smackfu 14y agoRead the article carefully. This was a non-Google plug-in using a private Google API that was then shutdown when Google stopped using it. This impacted users of the plug-in. This has nothing to do with Google, really.
- RyanMcGreal 14y agoWhat I took from the article is that it was a bad idea for the API client to let errors pass over in silence.
- brokentone 14y agoWell, there is silence at one level, and the next level reports a success (lack of spelling error).
- chickopozo 14y agoThey used a hacky method from the old IE Toolbar. That's like me scraping a website and blaming them when they change it.
- knowledgesale 14y agoA basic spellchecker is extremely simple to implement: http://norvig.com/spell-correct.html http://norvig.com/spell-correct.html An instance with a similar code could be run, say, at Heroku (it would even be for free for the low traffic) with, say, a Flask wrapper: http://flask-restful.readthedocs.org/en/latest/api.html http://flask-restful.readthedocs.org/en/latest/api.html If the output format is reproduced, all it would take is changing the reference url.
- thejosh 14y agoGood idea if someone has a large amount of WP installs (for clients, etc)..
- bru 14y ago>A basic spellchecker is extremely simple to implement That reminds me of this article: http://prog21.dadgum.com/29.html http://prog21.dadgum.com/29.html "A Spellchecker Used to Be a Major Feat of Software Engineering"
- lifeisstillgood 14y agoEvery time I read a norvig article I can feel myself get a little bit cleverer Edit: And dumber, until I work through the examples twice NB Chrome's spell checker has an edit distance of one. I learnt something useful and immediately applicable from norvig - I tell you this guy is great :-)
- T-zex 14y agoIt is simple in case of English. For highly inflectional languages [1] it is quite challenging. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inflection http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inflection
- knowledgesale 14y agoYou have not even glanced at the referred article, have you? It is not conceptually harder, pretty much the same thing. I played with some similar tasks for my native Russian. You can just add up a layer of hash tables/dictionaries to link to the original word. There are inflections in English too (and it is even harder for spelling purposes as the difference is often by one character) so it is conceptually similar.
- Someone 14y agoOn the other hand, compounding languages (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compound_(linguistics) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compound_(linguistics)) such as Dutch and German are somewhat harder. Words of over 20 characters are fairly common in Dutch and German (hence, it is not surprising that Wikipedia's lemma on word length is only available in those languages (http://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woordlengte) http://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woordlengte)) If you meet a word that looks no way like anything you have seen before you must try and check whether you can construct it (or something similar to it) from constituent parts that each are in your dictionary. That can be difficult, because you must also know how compound words can be constructed. For example, a preposition can be a part, but (typically?) not at the end of a word, you (typically?) have at most one verb, adjectives (typically?) show up at the start only, etc. (the 'typically?' disclaimers show my ignorance) A decent spelling checker needs to handle this, as it should signal missing spaces between words. For example, "blackeyed", "eyewhite", "blackkeyed", "grayblack" and "blackgray" are acceptable, but "eyedblack" is not.
- jimktrains2 14y agoI found the spell-checking in VIM to be quite awesome as well. I'm not sure the algo behind it, but it seems to give good results even when I totally butcher a word.
- pmorici 14y agoMaybe no one noticed because browsers have spell checking built in now?
- joekrill 14y agoWould this even apply to something like TinyMCE? I thought (read:assumed) the in-browser spell checking only worked against textarea's and text inputs.
- omgmog 14y agoIn TinyMCE you get both the browser-based spell checkers (via the right click context menu), and the spelling suggestions in TinyMCE (depending which spelling backend you're using: aspell, enchant, google spell, etc. http://www.tinymce.com/wiki.php/plugin:spellchecker http://www.tinymce.com/wiki.php/plugin:spellchecker)
- Valien 14y agoWe use TinyMCE and a .NET plugin that uses the GoogleSpell check service. It's dead right now and we are trying to find a solve for it.
- passionfruit 14y agoI decided to use Yandex Speller since at the time I was researching this issue it was clear that Google Spell was an undocumented and unsupported feature. http://api.yandex.ru/speller/ http://api.yandex.ru/speller/
- ffk 14y agoAccording to the TinyMCE, you can use aspell. http://www.tinymce.com/wiki.php/Plugin:spellchecker http://www.tinymce.com/wiki.php/Plugin:spellchecker You can get a windows build of aspell at http://aspell.net/win32/ http://aspell.net/win32/ Instructions are on the wiki on how to wire it up.
- lini 14y agoMost (if not all) WYSIWYG HTML editors like TinyMCE use a contenteditable container (e.g. div) and all current browsers offer spell check in the contenteditable element.
- swinglock 14y agoSpell-checking these days is and should be a function of the browser.
- Mahn 14y ago...unless you want to implement some sort of server-side automated correcting that improves bad quality comments for instance. Rare, and possibly not very practical, but I've seen attempts at it here and there.
- aeonsky 14y agoMore bloated software, yeeeey!!
- ConstantineXVI 14y agoI'll take the software bloat over the network bloat from the extra requests sending every keystroke over the wire.
- robin_reala 14y agoOn OSX at least spell checking is a function of the OS rather than the browser.
- eli 14y agoBut I want to add domain-specific wordlists to the spell checking in my web app. I don't think this is that unusual a request.
- ck2 14y agoI think I can see the next product headed for the graveyard?
- marknutter 14y agoGoogle what now?
- campuscodi 14y agoNothing.... He just wanted another backlash against Google policies. But nobody cares about Google fartsy products anymore after we all gave up Google for good sine closing down Reader... right? or am I the only one that stuck to that method of protest :)))))
- donohoe 14y agoWell, just tried Wordpress VIP spell-checker and it works just fine. If they were relying on this feature they've fixed it on their side.
- tcwc 14y agoThis was just a private API that presumably Google no longer uses. I wonder if this is related to the new Chrome spelling suggest feature (http://mashable.com/2013/03/29/chrome-spell-check/ http://mashable.com/2013/03/29/chrome-spell-check/), and if that means there's a new private undocumented API for people to play with.
- ommunist 14y agoThis is the plan. And in the end They will switch off Google and this is what St. John saw as Apocalypse.
- espinchi 14y agoWell the users of our Spell Checker app for Android did notice. Sure, we know it's entirely our fault for using a non-public API.
- jpswade 14y agoThis reminds of what happened with the (unofficial) Google Weather API. People should really disclose what APIs they use and offer alternatives should the first go down, especially when it's unofficial.
- Cushman 14y agoActually, I have been noticing some false positives in Chrome on Windows in the last few weeks... I wonder if it could be related somehow. Hm, I don't seem to have online spellcheck enabled though. Perhaps not.
- dasil003 14y agoWell... someone noticed.
- brokentone 14y agoThis blew up while I was away, sweet! So there are a few takaways. All WP and other TinyMCE spellcheckers are silently erroring now. Not cool. In general, people should properly handle errors, and not rely on non-public APIs.
- IheartApplesDix 14y agoso many people use ajax.googleapis.com it's ridiculous. Most the time when you block this, the page fails to load at all. That's fine though because they often don't have content that interests me anyway if they're that type of dev on the web.
- agpen 14y agoThat type of dev? One who uses fully public and well documented APIs to fetch extremely common libraries from a fast CDN? The horror! ajax.googleapis.com isn't comparable to this now-defunct undocumented private API at all.
- segmondy 14y agolesson people should learn, stop building your business around FREE/PUBLIC APIs. If you are not paying for it, don't use it for your product.
- packetslave 14y agono, the lesson people should learn is "stop building your business around UNPUBLISHED/PRIVATE APIs." If you do, you have no excuse for complaining when they go away.
- paul_f 14y agoWe use Google spellchecker with TinyMCE in our app (salestrakr.com) and it is currently working just fine. If it was down, it was for a short period of time. Though apparently long enough for someone to write a blog post, come up with a funny title, and get it on HN.