I’ve always wondered what would be the easiest way to have a vast spelling checker for small phases, for use if your site takes a user string, searches the database, but returns no results. At first I thought about algorithms to compare the words to results in the contents of the database, so I did I quick google search, and right there, on the top of google, was my answer!

Googles “Did you mean” feature not only finds the nearest result to what the user typed, but also the most common search phrase if the query was vague - just what you need, eh?

I guessed this has been done before by somebody, but I couldn’t find it anywhere, so I quickly threw together a PHP script to test it out…

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