Dangerous Thinking

Yep, I got snagged by this post on Yahoo’s blog.

What are the common words that vex our searchers? We applied our best spell checking skills to the data and came up with this list of the top 20 misspelled words in Search…

1. Wallmart (Wal-Mart)
2. Rachel Ray (Rachael Ray)
3. Amtrack (Amtrak)
4. Hillary Duff (Hilary Duff)
5. Katherine McPhee (Katharine McPhee)
6. Britany Spears (Britney Spears)
7. Geneology (Genealogy)
8. Jaime Pressley (Jaime Pressly)
9. Volkswagon (Volkswagen)
10. Wikepedia (Wikipedia)
11. William Sonoma (Williams-Sonoma)
12. Tatoo (Tattoo)
13. Travelosity (Travelocity)
14. Elliot Yamin (Elliott Yamin)
15. Kiera Knightley (Keira Knightley)
16. Kelly Pickler (Kellie Pickler)
17. Brittney Spears (Britney Spears)
18. Avril Lavinge (Avril Lavigne)
19. Rianna (Rihanna)
20. Jordan Sparks (Jordin Sparks)

I have to say all it proves is teens can’t spell selebrety names.

OK, I know it’s a bit of fun, but I’d love to see the Top 100 misspelled non-celebrity words worldwide and in the UK, and the Top 100 misspelled brands. That may just be interesting.

Last week, Google announced it is to unify its search results into a single search, called Web. The news made the mainstream media.

On its blog, Google said:

Here’s the challenge in a nutshell: Until now, we’ve only been able to show news, books, local and other such results at the top of the page, like this example for [trends in education]. But it’s a tall order to earn placement at the top of our search results, so plenty often we end up not showing these kinds of results even when they might be useful. If only we could smartly place such results elsewhere on the page when they don’t quite deserve the top, we could share the benefits of these great Google features with people much more often.

and concluded:

This is just the tip of the iceberg in making Google results more comprehensive and useful. It has involved launching a number of new systems that will make it much easier for us to continue making improvements so you get the most relevant information from our varied content areas. We hope you like it. And finally, we’re especially happy to know that Google is still very much a place where we can get big things done!

At Web Positioning Centre, we’ve seen some shuffling and inconsistency in Google results for some of our clients recently. Internally, we predicted some upcoming changes in the Google algorithm. I guess we were right.

It’s difficult to know exactly what implications Google’s unified search will have. One immediate response is that with more results competing for each search, you may have to invest more in SEO to get on that first page. Google takes a positive spin on its Webmaster Blog and makes some suggestions on how to take advantage of universal search.

We’ll be keeping a close eye on the effect of the changes following the launch on Wednesday. It’ll almost certainly take a few weeks for things to settle down and it should start becoming clear what kind of sites and content Google is giving highest weightings to.