Until last week, I kind of thought moving to Ruby on Rails was stupid for long time developers in another language (like me) - what was the point of learning a totally new language?

Well until Friday night, when I was reading some article about Rails (I forget what it was), I suddenly got a burst of “lets have a look!”. I typed rubyonrails.com into my browser, and continued to look at the screencasts and the rest of the site/wiki for a while, until deciding I would in fact try it - I had nothing to loose! I downloaded it and got RadRails (an IDE for rails), then started doing the really basic stuff, like creating projects, doing some Hello Worlds’ - all looked great, and the simple MVC file structure was easy to understand after using CakePHP! By this time it was already 4am, and while I was very much excited to carry on, I needed rest.

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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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