Swan Flu tops bad search engine spelling
A list of the most frequent search engine misspellings has been revealed, including Swan Flu, Susan Boil and Mysapce.Yahoo! say many recent errors by their searchers are sound-alike spelling mistakes where people may not know exactly what they are looking for.
This explains errors such as Swan Flu for Swine Flu, Paperview boxing for pay-per-view boxing and Dancing With the Starts instead of Dancing With the Stars.
Others are accounted for as basic typos like Mysapce where it should be MySpace.
I would normally add a "witty" comment here, but given how frequently we include a typo or misspelling on NewsLite I think it is best not to start mocking misspellers.
Vera Chan of Yahoo! said: "In the Search box, misspellers have savaged the first and last name of our own U.S. president 'barack oboma,' 'barak obama'".
Common spelling errors on Yahoo! (last 30 days)
Yahoo!
Common spelling errors on Yahoo! (last 30 days)
- Swan Flu (for Swine Flu)
- Susan Boil (for "Britain's Got Talent" contender Susan Boyle)
- Brack Obama (for U.S. President Barack Obama)
- Sonia Sotomeyer (for Supreme Court justice nominee Sonia Sotomayor)
- Rachel Ray (for Food Network host Rachael Ray)
- Paperview boxing (for cable programming pay-per-view boxing)
- Amtrack (for train system Amtrak)
- Wallmart (for retailer Wal-Mart)
- Farrah Faucet (for actress Farrah Fawcett)
- Rod Steward (for singer Rod Stewart)
- Arlene Specter (for Senator Arlen Specter)
- “Dancing With the Starts” (for ABC reality competition Dancing With the Stars)
- Bea Author” (for the late comedian Bea Arthur)
- Brittany Spears (for singer Britney Spears)
- Chris Allen (for “American Idol” winner Kris Allen)
- Configure worm (for computer virus Conficker worm)
- Mysapce (for MySpace)
Yahoo!
