Blue Bonnets outside Copperas Cove, Texas
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by Charles Miller

Deep in the heart of the Texas hill country near the end of the stubby little Interstate Highway 14 lies the town of Copperas Cove, ZIP code 76522. While I have visited very close by I never actually made it across the city limits of that town. That not withstanding, the town I have never visited will, for me, be forever associated with GIGO.

GIGO is common tech-slang for "Garbage In, Garbage Out." The acronym describes the principle in mathematics and computer science stating that the quality of output is determined by the quality of input. If flawed or poor-quality data are used, the results will also be flawed, regardless of how sophisticated the output system might be. This simple fact is a huge challenge for Artificial Intelligence, but that is a topic for another day because today I want to focus on a beneficial technological achievement.

Professionally, I look back on my decades of database programming and am well aware that GIGO is the nemesis of all databases and all who use them. The reason Copperas Cove stands out in my memory goes back thirty years to when I was programming a PoS (Point of Sale) program for the cash registers of a retail business near there. The PoS system was designed to record the name and address of each customer along with their order; and it was up to the store employees to key this data into the system correctly.

A problem arose when the company management wanted to use the database to send out mailings to their customers. If the names of the cities or their ZIP codes were wrong, then the Postal Service would be unable to deliver that mail. The source of the problem was that as they entered sales into the cash register, the geniuses who worked at the store managed to come up with not two, not three, but THIRTY-FOUR different ways to spell "Copperas Cove"! It then fell to me to write a short block of computer code to recognize and correct all the misspellings so that all the loyal customers who lived in Copperas Cove could receive their discount coupons.

Copperas Cove, Texas
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Today the real geniuses are the programmers at Google who obviously have done the same thing I did, but on a Texas-sized scale. Try doing a Google search for "Coperas Cave Texas" (without the quotes) and Google will respond with a note explaining "Including results for Copperas Cove Texas" and also offers "Search only for "Coperas" "Cave" Texas?" in case you really do want to search for the misspelled name If you mangle your search query further by searching for "Copers Cave Tesas" Google will respond with "There is no "Coopers Cave" in Texas, but there is a city called Copperas Cove which likely is what you are looking for…"

The Google search engine is incredibly good at guessing what you intended to search for whenever you enter a wrong or misspelled search query. The search engine detects spelling errors by analyzing queries against a vast index of known spelling errors, typing accidents, user behavior data, and contextual clues. It then suggests search terms more likely to find the right results.

And what the engineers and programmers at Google have done, whether intentional or not, is create the world's best spell checker. When my word processor spell-checking feature fails to correct a word, and I cannot recall how to spell it, I simply do a Google search for the misspelled word. It pleases me to know that future generations of grade school children will now be spared the frustration I had to repeatedly endure when asking my elementary school teacher how to spell a word, and she always said "Look it up in the dictionary." I wanted to scream "You can't find it if you don't know how to spell it!" Google has never once admonished me to go look up a word in a dictionary and it always politely suggests alternate spellings when I search for a word that is not in the dictionary.

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Charles Miller is a freelance computer consultant with decades of IT experience and a Texan with a lifetime love for Mexico. The opinions expressed are his own. He may be contacted at 415-101-8528 or email FAQ8 (at) SMAguru.com.

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