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In the 1970s, spell checking programs debuted on mainframe computers.  In the 1980s, personal computers arrived and spell checkers soon followed, especially embedded within word processors.  In the 1990s, spell checkers joined the Internet revolution and debuted in e-mail programs and web browsers.

Today, spell checkers are virtually everywhere, from mobile text messaging to social networking websites.  In fact, nowadays you would be surprised (and probably annoyed) if spell checking wasn’t available whenever and wherever you were entering text.

Spell checkers are far from perfect.  However, their greatest feature is not just telling you that you have typed a word it can’t find an exact match for in its dictionary – it also provides a list of potential matches that may contain the word you were trying to spell.

In my previous post Apples and Oranges, I asked how many times you have looked up a contact in your e-mail program only to get zero results back.  Now, this might be understandable if you were looking up the e-mail address for Apple by typing in Orange.  However, most of the time what you typed was off by just a single letter (i.e. Aple).

Practically all of the devices and applications we use on a daily basis provide only exact matching.  Isn’t this just as surprising and annoying as not providing a spell checker?

For goodness sake, it’s 2009. Why does this problem persist – especially since the core technology to virtually eradicate this problem exists. Shouldn’t we demand the standard functionality of a Data Checker?

A Data Checker wouldn’t be clairvoyant.  However, if it couldn’t find an exact match for your lookup, it would provide a ranked list of potential matches.

Shouldn’t all of our devices and applications provide the capability of overcoming data variations, lack of standards, omissions, and other inconsistencies in our lookups and searches?

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Apples and Oranges