mediajunk

To display the usefulness and range of its spell checker, Google has listed every single misspelling of the name "Britney Spears" that its search engine detects over a three-month period.

I did a quick count, and realised Google had detected 592 different misspellings of "Britney Spears". I wouldn't have guessed there could be so many wrong spellings of a name that has a total of three syllables. Some are typos, but many seem to be genuine spelling faults.

For example, there were 40134 searches for "brittany" spears; 36315 for "brittney"; 24342 for "britany"; 7331 for "britny"; 6633 for "briteny"; 2696 for "britteny"; and 1635 for "brittny".

Allowances must be made, I suppose, for the fact that a lot of people searching for Britney Spears don't actually speak English.

Nevertheless, I wonder whether the Google spell checker is improving people's spelling -- or further deteriorating it. As with word processors, users may grow to rely on spell checkers doing the "thinking" for them.

But maybe it's not wrong to depend on software to correct our spellings -- rather than, y'know, actually having to use our brains (sheesh, what a drag!).

I'm spell-checking this post, after all. And I confess, I didn't really count the Britney misspellings -- I cut-and-pasted them into MS Excel, and let the spreadsheet count them for me!

Hmmm... maybe I could devise an algorithm to maintain this blog...