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Spell it Rite, Wright, Right
Did you ever come across a Web site, Usenet discussion, or email message with words or acronyms you couldn't decipher? It may have been written in chat room language, a common mode of communicating, particularly among young people who frequent the Web today. Intentional distortion of spelling is constantly evolving. Two sources that may save you from having to call your friend's teenage daughter for a translation of terminology are http://www.techdictionary.com/chat.html and http://www.tasgreetings.com/chat.htm.
In addition to intentional misspellings on the Internet, accidental mistakes and variations abound on Web pages: common typos, misspellings (on the part of the Web page creator AND the Web searcher), variations between British and American spelling (labor, labour; program, programme; theater, theatre), transliterations from other languages (Taliban, Taleban, Talaban) and non-standardized spellings (disk, disc). Is the burger empire MacDonalds, MacDonald's, McDonalds, or McDonald's? Try searching Google (http://www.google.com) or another search engine for Mcdonald's french fries using each of these variations. Compare these results from a recent search:
1. macdonalds french fries (retrieved 890 hits)
2. mcdonalds french fries (retrieved 15,400 hits)
3. macdonald's french fries (retrieved 1,170 hits)
4. mcdonald's french fries (retrieved 26,100 hits)
Two basic conclusions that can be drawn from these searches: Spelling counts! Misspelling also counts! To do a comprehensive search on the Web, be sure to use common misspellings of your terms, as well as the correctly spelled versions. Additionally, punctuation also counts. In some search engines and databases, leaving out punctuation can affect (or is it effect?) your results.
Try comparing search results for other correctly spelled words with their commonly incorrectly spelled alternatives. You may discover that a truly comprehensive search in any Internet search engine must include additional searches incorporating likely variant spellings of terms.
A very good article that details the impact of spelling on Web searches is "Spelling and Searching the Internet: An Overlooked Problem," by Edward Proctor in The Journal of Academic Librarianship, volume 28, number 5, pages 297-305.
Want to find this article online (or is it on-line?)? Look no further than UB's Electronic Journal Holdings page (http://ublib.buffalo.edu/libraries/e-resources/ft.html). From this link, type "journal of academic librarianship" in the box provided. After you click SEARCH, three sources will be listed that provide full text articles from that journal. Click on one of the options that includes the date of the article, fill in the blanks, and voila!—the full text of the article will be displayed. And of course, AARL4H (ask any reference librarian for help!).
—Nina Cascio and Rick McRae, University Libraries