Peter Norvig, Director of Research at Google, write a nice article explaining, in a simplified way, how the spell checker used by Google works (when you type a wrong word and you see the suggestion “Did you mean stuff?”).

Mr. Norvig additionally displayed an sample implementation (a “toy spell checker”), and as we can realize, tools used by Google, Yahoo and Microsoft probably relies in more advanced techniques. Anyway, the article and the sample code are a good example to teach how the spell checker works.

After read the article, I got me really motived to try to make a similar Java version for the algorithm, with 2 goals in mind: better learning and improve my Python skills (as it’s the language Norvig used for this version).

I made it, and it’s in the link you can see in the page top: Java Spelling Corrector..

I’ve sent an email to Peter Norvig tell him about this version, but he was in vacation. Yesterday he replied me. Additionally to a “Good Job!”, he was gentle enough to link to my sample implementation in his article (see at the page bottom with link to other languages).