A significant improvement over the previous spell checking mechanism

Mar 21, 2012 15:57 GMT  ·  By

Google Docs has updated its spell check engine and it seems that it's now using Google's web spell check service, the same one used in Google Search and more recently in Google Chrome.

Google has quietly rolled out the feature, but it seems to be enabled for all users or is in the process of being rolled out.

Previously, the Google Docs document editor used a simple dictionary-based spell-checking feature. Any words that weren't found in the dictionary were underlined as spelling errors.

This could mean any names, technical terms, even things like "isn't." It was a rough tool that needed a lot of handholding, i.e. "add to dictionary" to work.

The new spell check system is a great upgrade though for a couple of reasons. For one, it relies on the Google spell-check online service which is a lot more accurate than any dictionary method.

Instantly, you should notice a lot less false positives, zero in most cases. But this is only half the update, the new spell-checking system also looks at context, it's now a grammar checker as well. For example, it can detect whether you meant "its" or "it's" based on the context.

This makes the new system a huge improvement over the previous one. It should also make it a much more useful tool to Google Docs users.

That said, it's still nowhere near on par with more established tools. For one, docs doesn't make any distinction between spelling and grammar errors, i.e. different colors for the underline.

What's more, while spelling false positives may be gone, there seem to plenty of them for the grammar checker. When it works, the grammar checker can be quite useful, but when it fails, and it seems to be failing more often than not, it's annoying.

Granted, this is just the first iteration of the feature and it may only be a test. The implementation will get better in time and so will the quality of the suggestions.