When searching for something in Google, if you misspell a word (may be by mistake or may be when you really mean this non-dictionary word), Google says:
“Showing results for ….. Search instead for …….”.
I am trying to figure out how this would work.
This basically means being able to find the closest dictionary word to the non-dictionary word entered. How does it work? One way I can guess is :
count no. of instances of each character and then scan dictionary to find a word with same no. of instances of each character (only with +-1 difference). But this will also return anagrams.
Is some kind of probabilistic model of any use here such as Markov etc. I don’t understand Markov well enough to throw it around but just a very wild guess.
Any insights?
You’re forgetting that google has a lot more information available to it then you do. They track when people type in a word, don’t select a result, and then do another search shortly afterwards. They then use this information to suggest better searches for you.
See How does the Google "Did you mean?" Algorithm work? for a fuller explanation.
Note that this approach makes sense when you consider that Google aren’t actually doing spell-checking. Instead, they are trying to work out what search term will give you the answer you are looking for. Obviously there is a lot of overlap between this and spell-checking, but it means they are not always trying to correct a search for, e.g., “Flickr”.