Mozila, Mozella, Mircosoft And Firefix, How Search Engines Handle Typos
A typo industry exists out there. You may not know if but typo domains are some of the most attractive domains for webmasters who want to cash in on a popular brand or name without having to compete against all the other webmasters who target the same.
Keyword research tools such as Google Adwords Keyword Tool [link] or the free Wordtracker keyword tool [link] allow a webmaster to research names. They usually offer keyword suggestions as well.
If you for instance type in Firefox you get suggestions like Mozila, Mozella, Mozzila or Moxilla which all get thousands of searches per month.
Search typos can be dangerous for the searcher as they often lead to third party sites and not the main site the searcher wanted to find. How do the search results look for the Mozilla typos? Let us take a look how Google Search, Bing and Yahoo Search handle those typos.
Mozila
Google Search lists mozilla.com on top followed by typo domains that are not maintained by Mozilla.
Bing on the other hand is more helpful in this case. The Microsoft search engine includes results for the term Mozilla automatically assuming that this was the term the searcher was looking for. Options are available to remove the terms if the search term was in fact Mozila.
Not a single typo is displayed on the first page of Bing when a user searches for the term Mozila.
Lets us take a look at other popular typos:
Firefix
Google this time assumes that the searcher wanted to find information about Firefox. The top two results have been reserved by the top two spots of the Firefox search, the remaining list the results for the Firefix search.
Google Suggest comes into play as well. This suggest as you type feature displays search terms that the user might be looking for automatically. The first suggestion for Firefix is Firefox which aids users in avoiding typos.
Bing again assumes that the user is looking for Firefox information and integrates those search results in the listing. There is again not a single occurrence of a typo domain on the first page of the search results.
Mozella
Google assumes that the searcher is looking for the American singer and song writer Mozella and displays only results about her on the first page of the search results.
Bing again includes Mozilla in the search results listing. This time the results are mixed showing both links to official Mozilla pages but also to pages of the singer.
Mozzila
The first page of the Google search results are dominated by typo domains. The official Mozilla website is placed in the third spot with two typo domains above it. Google Suggest kicks in once again and suggests Mozilla to the user.
Bing mixes the search results again by adding searches for Mozilla to the mix. No typo domain is listed on the first page of the search results.
Mircosoft
Both search engines assume that Microsoft was the search term the user was looking for. Google mixes Microsoft owned domains with typo results that target Mircosoft. Bing on the other hand displays only Microsoft related results.
We took a look at how Yahoo Search handles the typos above. Results were similar to Bing. The search engine always suggested that the phrase entered was a typo and delivered search results based on what it thought the user wanted to find.
Verdict
The examples provided are limited and do not offer enough data to come to general conclusions. It does however seem that Bing and Yahoo Search handle typos better than Google Search for a variety of searches.
Google Suggest can be helpful but only if users pay attention to the suggested terms, and obviously only if Google thinks that the phrase is a typo and that the user wants to find something different than typed.
Have you encountered typos on the web? What did you do to find the right results? Let us know in the comments.
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Doesn’t Windows 8 know that www. or http:// are passe ?
Well it is a bit difficulty to distinguish between name.com domains and files for instance.
I know a service made by google that is similar to Google bookmarks.
http://www.google.com/saved
@Ashwin–Thankful you delighted my comment; who knows how many “gamers” would have disagreed!
@Martin
The comments section under this very article (3 comments) is identical to the comments section found under the following article:
https://www.ghacks.net/2023/08/15/netflix-is-testing-game-streaming-on-tvs-and-computers/
Not sure what the issue is, but have seen this issue under some other articles recently but did not report it back then.
Omg a badge!!!
Some tangible reward lmao.
It sucks that redditors are going to love the fuck out of it too.
With the cloud, there is no such thing as unlimited storage or privacy. Stop relying on these tech scums. Purchase your own hardware and develop your own solutions.
This is a certified reddit cringe moment. Hilarious how the article’s author tries to dress it up like it’s anything more than a png for doing the reddit corporation’s moderation work for free (or for bribes from companies and political groups)
Almost al unlmited services have a real limit.
And this comment is written on the dropbox article from August 25, 2023.
First comment > @ilev said on August 4, 2012 at 7:53 pm
For the God’s sake, fix the comments soon please! :[
Yes. Please. Fix the comments.
With Google Chrome, it’s only been 1,500 for some time now.
Anyone who wants to force me in such a way into buying something that I can get elsewhere for free will certainly never see a single dime from my side. I don’t even know how stupid their marketing department is to impose these limits on users instead of offering a valuable product to the paying faction. But they don’t. Even if you pay, you get something that is also available for free elsewhere.
The algorithm has also become less and less savvy in terms of e.g. English/German translations. It used to be that the bot could sort of sense what you were trying to say and put it into different colloquialisms, which was even fun because it was like, “I know what you’re trying to say here, how about…” Now it’s in parts too stupid to translate the simplest sentences correctly, and the suggestions it makes are at times as moronic as those made by Google Translations.
If this is a deep-learning AI that learns from users’ translations and the phrases they choose most often – which, by the way, is a valuable, moneys worthwhile contribution of every free user to this project: They invest their time and texts, thereby providing the necessary data for the AI to do the thing as nicely as they brag about it in the first place – alas, the more unprofessional users discovered the translator, the worse the language of this deep-learning bot has become, the greater the aggregate of linguistically illiterate users has become, and the worse the language of this deep-learning bot has become, as it now learns the drivel of every Tom, Dick and Harry out there, which is why I now get their Mickey Mouse language as suggestions: the inane language of people who can barely spell the alphabet, it seems.
And as a thank you for our time and effort in helping them and their AI learn, they’ve lowered the limit from what was once 5,000 to now 1,500…? A big “fuck off” from here for that! Not a brass farthing from me for this attitude and behaviour, not in a hundred years.
When will you put an end to the mess in the comments?
Ghacks comments have been broken for too long. What article did you see this comment on? Reply below. If we get to 20 different articles we should all stop using the site in protest.
I posted this on [https://www.ghacks.net/2023/09/28/reddit-enforces-user-activity-tracking-on-site-to-push-advertising-revenue/] so please reply if you see it on a different article.
Comment redirected me to [https://www.ghacks.net/2012/08/04/add-search-the-internet-to-the-windows-start-menu/] which seems to be the ‘real’ article it is attached to
Comment redirected me to [https://www.ghacks.net/2012/08/04/add-search-the-internet-to-the-windows-start-menu/] which seems to be the ‘real’ article it is attached to
Article Title: Reddit enforces user activity tracking on site to push advertising revenue
Article URL: https://www.ghacks.net/2023/09/28/reddit-enforces-user-activity-tracking-on-site-to-push-advertising-revenue/
No surprises here. This is just the beginning really. I cannot see a valid reason as to why anyone would continue to use the platform anymore when there are enough alternatives fill that void.
I’m not sure if there is a point in commenting given that comments seem to appear under random posts now, but I’ll try… this comment is for https://www.ghacks.net/2023/09/28/reddit-enforces-user-activity-tracking-on-site-to-push-advertising-revenue/
My temporary “solution”, if you can call it that, is to use a VPN (Mullvad in my case) to sign up for and access Reddit via a European connection. I’m doing that with pretty much everything now, at least until the rest of the world catches up with GDPR. I don’t think GDPR is a magical privacy solution but it’s at least a first step.