"Swan Flu" and Other Commonly Misspelled Search Terms of the Month

Posted by Alex in Blog & Internet on June 28, 2009 at 1:20 pm

All of you Neatoramanauts know that we love tpyos here at Neatorama, but even we know how to spell Susan Boyle, MySpace and Swine Flu – those are just three of the most commonly misspelled (or perhaps mistyped) searches in Yahoo!

Vera H-C Chan of Yahoo! Buzz’ The Buzz Log has the list:

Recent Orthographic Abuses of the English Language on Yahoo!, Past 30 Days

* 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)

Link – via USA Today

Previously on Neatorama: Swine Flu: Bacon’s Revenge

 
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Wolfram Alpha: Blind to The Blogosphere

Posted by Alex in Blog & Internet, Neatorama Only on May 26, 2009 at 8:02 pm

Since its debut a little over a week ago, I've been playing with Wolfram|Alpha. For those of you who don't know, it is an ambitious project by Stephen Wolfram (of Mathematica fame).

Wolfram Alpha (I know, technically, it's Wolfram|Alpha, but I don't want to type in that vertical bar all the time) is not a search engine, in a sense that it returns webpages as query results like Google does - rather, it is a "computational knowledge engine." You and I may simply call it an "answer engine," ask it a question and it'll come up with the (usually right on the money) answer.

What is butter? Wolfie knows - it'll display the average nutrition facts. Ask it to convert $1 to British pounds, or the distance between San Francisco and Los Angeles. Who starred in Casablanca? How is the weather in New York on May 26, 1987? How much wood would a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood?

Impressive, eh?

Now, Stephen is a very smart guy. Indeed, he wrote his first paper on particle physics at the tender age of 16, received a PhD from Caltech at 20, and became a professor there at 21. And to be fair, Wolfram Alpha is very young and heavily geared towards computations. Furthermore, the scope of what the engine "knows" in terms of content is limited to areas covered by trusted sources like reference libraries fed to it by its programmers.

But currently, there's one large gaping hole missing from Wolfram Alpha: it is blind to blogs. Sure it knows about the meaning of life, and it has its own blog, but it knows nothing - nada, zip, zilch - about the blogosphere.

Technorati? Maybe you meant technology instead. According to Wolfie, Gizmodo = komodo (the island, the language, or the movie - but strangely not the animal); Techcrunch = Techuchulco (a city in Mexico). Boing Boing = Boina (a volcano).

Ask it about Neatorama and Wolfie thinks that you mean Panorama (which I learned is actually a city in Greece, that, at the time of my query, has a warm 73°F weather with relative humidity of 50%, wind of 7 mph and few clouds).

At least this blog fared better than Lifehacker, which got "lumpsucker" instead.

Heck, ask what is a blog?, and it'll think you're asking about logarithms:

Still, overall, I think Wolfram Alpha is a brilliant first step towards (dare I say it) an artificial intelligence - a universal computer a la Isaac Asimov's fantastic short story The Last Question. And I'm sure the hardworking people over at Wolfram Research will rectify this oversight soon.

But whatever you do, don't get Wolfie mad. This is what you'll get.

If you don't stop, it'll probably shove you out the pod bay door ...

 
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Twingly Top 100 Blogs

Posted by Alex in Blog & Internet on December 16, 2008 at 2:45 pm

Twingly, the spam-free Swedish blog search engine, has released its list of the Top 100 blogs in the world and Neatorama made it! (We’re no. 35)

Twingly groups the blogs it follows by language – so if you don’t write in English, you can still find out how you rank against other blogs in the same language. Another interesting thing that Twingly has is BlogRank, which is sort of like Google PageRank, but for blogs.

Link – Thanks Anton Johansson!

 
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Google Zeitgeist 2008

Posted by Alex in Blog & Internet on December 10, 2008 at 2:54 pm

We posted about Yahoo’s top searches of 2008 before on Neatorama. Well, Google has just released its 2008 Year-End Zeitgeist, and the results couldn’t be any different.

Here are the highlights from Google searches from around the world in 2008:

1. sarah palin
2. beijing 2008
3. facebook login
4. tuenti
5. heath ledger
6. obama
7. nasza klasa
8. wer kennt wen
9. euro 2008
10. jonas brothers

I had to look up tuenti (a Madrid-based social networking website, referred to many as the "Spanish Facebook"), nasza klasa (a Polish social networking website), and wer kennt wen (ditto, this time for Germans).

Link – Thanks Justin!

 
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Yahoo! 2008 Year in Review

Posted by Alex in Blog & Internet on December 1, 2008 at 8:23 pm

Can you believe it, 2008 is almost over! Yahoo! Buzz takes a look back at 2008 (well, so far anyways) in terms of what people are most interested in searching.

Taking number 1 spot is Britney Spears (no surprise there, she’s been at the top search for both Yahoo! and Google for years). The list changed somewhat from the top searches of 2007, though besides Britney, four search terms remained constant (WWE, RuneScape – an online game, Jessica Alba, Naruto – a Japanese manga series, and Lindsay Lohan).

Take a look at the entire list: Link – Thanks Jason Khoury!

 
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