Last month we ran a brief post introducing Spellr.us, a service that monitors websites for spelling errors. Little was known about the site at the time - all we had to go by was a teaser splash page. The site has finally entered a private beta, and it shows a lot of potential. For those looking to try it out for themselves, you can grab one of 150 invites here.
Spellr.us monitors webpages by running site-wide spell checks at regular intervals. Results are presented as snapshots of pages, with errors highlighted in bright boxes (a mouse-over displays suggested corrections). Members can also choose to have errors sent to them in RSS feeds - a feature that will be especially handy for large sites that make frequent posts. Besides the visual snapshots, Spellr.us can list misspelled words according to their frequency across the site. This means that words like TechCrunch or Flickr, which are commonly used but aren’t in the dictionary (yet), can be quickly found and added to a custom dictionary.
I ran TechCrunch.com through a trial run, and the results were promising. Error flagging worked very well, with different colors to distinguish between possible errors and obvious typos. And the site’s main dashboard, which links to each error, made navigating across hundreds of pages surprisingly painless.
Unfortunately the site is still very much a beta, so we won’t be implementing the service any time soon. Custom dictionaries don’t work yet, and the system doesn’t offer any way to omit user comments from the search (we wound up with over 20,000 flagged errors because of this, though we made a few mistakes ourselves…). Spellr.us says that all of these features will be introduced by the general release. Grammar checking is also on the horizon, though a concrete date hasn’t been established.
Other players in this space include web tool supplier NetMechanic and TextTrust, which uses a combination of human and automated spellcheckers.
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Sounds Interesting, but don’t you think spell checking problem is already solved. Most of us spell check before we publish out blog, some of us do it more than once. This would have been better as an add-on or something smaller than a stand alone website.
no, because techcrunch needs it….
This would be a great option for those of use who spent 6 months or so writing on their blog before realizing that they wanted it to be a little bit more professional. 6 months of not-so-good writing is tough to proof read, but if I could just get the spelling right I would be a a little bit more at ease.
They’re STILL in beta?
What a Joke!
The main code line here should run no more than a thousand lines, and that’s being very generous. They should have had a fully fledged product in less than a month.
Anyone else see the humor in the web2.0 name for a spell check service?
“Spellr.us should be spelled Speller.us”
@jack Something as simple as 1000 lines of code is hardly worth creating a product out of. Fun tool - maybe, but spellr.us has been created not just to ’spell check your website’ but to make keeping your site free of errors painless and to an extent - fun.
spellr.us should be a thousand lines of code no more than ebay should be a simple php shopping cart.
I have used NetMechanic before (TextTrust was too expensive) and from what I’ve seen so far spellr.us is a completely different product than a simple site spell checker. Of course, if you feel you could do something much better much quicker please do! More competition = better for us end users
BTW the site says only 27 Tech Crunch invites remaining - kgo!
Thanks for the feedback all
Charl and I have actually been working on the custom dictionaries in our SVN repository so it should be in the live beta over the next week; likewise with DOM segmentation which will allow you to use CSS selectors to define areas of your page to exclude from the scan results (i.e blog comments). Not to mention a pile of other cool tweaks and features I’ve been working on 
It seems to be very cool to spell er as r after flickr.com was acquired by yahoo.
flickr.com
soonr.com
I probably need to change our site from mobiwatcher.com to mobiwatchr.com
I just hope somebody contacts Arlington Alerts (suburban VA), so we don’t all have to panic with news of the Rapid Fox
Wheres my invite code! 150 thats it?! send me one plz! seee i neeud utit!
Hello,
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See the over 700 possible typos I found on the newly redesigned http://www.whitehouse.gov website and over 460 possible typos on the U.S. Government Printing Office website using my high quality industrial strength website content quality assurance service at allankirsch.tech.officelive.com.
This service does much more than just spell checking.