lucien spellcheck

[slam]

so, as most of you know, i've been working on a little project that adds googles 'did you mean' spell checker to library web catalogs (cause your sorry asses can't spell 'dostoyevsky'). anyways, it's a project that's been years in the making.

the main hold up has been finding a good source of spell checking. it's been hard as hell convincing google, yahoo, or ms to let me pay them for access to their spell checkers. and a regular dictionary based checker won't work for libraries; they need to be able to handle proper nouns.

anywho, i've finally hit upon a solution, and have it up-and-running! (please, if you know the details of how it works, don't discuss it on here. i'd like to keep the solution a secret!)

anyways, i need some testers. if you have a few minutes, please try out the little search side widget on www.jaunter.com. let me know if it seems comparable to google's spell checker. in my opinion, it's better!

right-o. larryhead, you ready to help me with a site redesign? i'm ready to take this global!

[mrjohnchimpo]

where does the "did you mean" pop up? I enter search terms and click search but nothing comes up.

EDIT: nevermind...i was entering such poor mispellings that it seems there were no suggestions.

[slam]

nevermind...i was entering such poor mispellings that it seems there were no suggestions.

yeah, it's not miracle worker. but it seems to do a pretty good job.

doublep is a genius. if only he visited the board more often... the solution was totally his genius concept.

[slam]

oops. i had updated the php file that the clients use, but not the one that the tester on the jaunter.com site uses. it's fixed now. if you already tried, it was still pulling from google. now it's using my solution...

word.

[Soul Queen]

Since this is geared towards libraries, do you want us to play with it in regards to putting in horribly spelled last names to see what it pulls up?

what type of things are you looking for? For the most part when I played with it, it pulled up what I looked for. for a few last names, not.
Do you need a examples?

[False Alarm]

looked good to me. i tried 20 or so searches for proper nouns and it caught most of em and offered the right suggestion. it missed a few, but google missed all the same except for one (an asian name).

[Ag Au]

working well for me - good job! and congrats!

[Soul Queen]

Congrats on getting it running. I should have put that in my first post. :o

[larryhead]

it seems to work pretty good!

i sent you an email about redesign stuff, i'll even give you the larryhead special rate ;)

[slam]

Do you need a examples?

nope, just a general 'yup, seems good enough'!

my site is now officially 'turned on' for sign ups again. i emailed the 70 or so librarians who had contacted me over the last few years as well. i shall let you all know how it goes!