Contac Lens: The evidence behind the myth of Internet spelling mistakes

I was recently listening to a radio broadcast in which the interviewer and interviewee were advocating the need for a standardization of language in order for the Internet to become more accessible to the masses. In the examples they were talking about the Thai and Loa languages; and Japanese and Chinese languages. Part of their argument was based on the concept that the Internet is unable to decipher different spellings of words.

After listening to the broadcast I decided to go to the office and deliberately miss-spell certain words and phrases in a search engine to see what the results would be. One of the words/phrases miss-spelt was "contac lens". Now, as is the case with your search, the search engine did ask me whether or not I wanted to check to see if I had miss-spelt the word/phrase. But, clearly, the results page also told me that I could visit 2,340 web pages where there was a miss spelling of that word/phrase. It was then that I realized that the Internet is far bigger than anyone could imagine. Just think of it, 2,340 web-pages have the word/phrase "contac lens" deliberately miss-spelt just so you, the customer, can find their web-site. This really is ingenious marketing.

So, whilst I was looking, I decided to see how many of these 2,340 web-page hits may have resulted from the fact that "contac lens" is actually the correct spelling of what I would know as contact lens, but in another language (I was gambling on a European language possibly spelling contact lens like this). However, after looking through the first 10 pages of search engine results, without hide nor hare of a foreign language in sight, but rather copious amounts of English language sites with a deliberately miss-spelt word, I came to the conclusion that the interviewer and interviewee in the radio broadcaster that set this change reaction of events off where in fact wrong. The Internet is actually quite capable of locating varying spellings of the same word/phrases; however, all that is needed is for people to input the wrong spelling of the word/phrase in the first place!

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