Oh, the online search blunders we make!

Inspired by the fact that South Africa is a new swine flu hot spot, I decided to look up the ‘hot topic’ out of personal interest, and stumbled across an interesting post on the Pop Hangover site.

Titled ‘Swan Flu? Susan Boil? Farrah Faucet?’, it is a shortened version of a Yahoo! Buzz list of the most commonly misspelled Yahoo search terms – some of these are forgivable, in the case of leaving out a letter, but most show simple carelessness and that folk are NOT streetsmart!.

•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)

This is just from the past month – and the terms are actually Googleable. Can you imagine all the mis-spelled online searches from the past few years? The mind boggles!