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Mistyping.

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4 comments on Mistyping.

I wonder if Cliff Reader, Ph.D., Digital Consultant, Business Development, Expert Witness, gets a whole lot of unexplained web traffic from lots of people who never follow up to ask for any consulting or expert witnessing.   

He certainly gets a lot from me.

 I can't possibly be the only person to one-handedly attempt to access Google Reader by typing "reader.google.com" into the address bar of my web browser, and accidentally wind up going to "reader.com" instead.  Several times a day.

The same thing happens to me with a particular blog that I like to read on occasion, but don't subscribe to because I only want to see it when the political stories won't put me in a foul mood.  The first four letters of its name, followed by ".com," are the URL of some kind of soft-core porn site.  Bleah. 

I realize that there is a solution to this problem, and its name is "bookmarks."  But, hey, it's a slow day and I needed to rant about something.

 

Comments

4 responses to “Mistyping.”

  1. Robin Avatar
    Robin

    You know, I (almost) never type anything into the web browser to search. I usually use the Google search in the right-hand corner of Firefox. That way, I can click on exactly where I want to go, rather than stumble onto some other site. I’ve taught my children to do this, too, ever since a friend of mine went looking for “rules for t-ball”, mistyped it, and ended up at a site with porn cartoons. With a name just similar enough for someone to stumble on to it.

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  2. bearing Avatar
    bearing

    Well, I wasn’t searching — I would have used the equivalent Google search box on the right-hand corner of my web browser, too, if I was going to search. I knew exactly where I wanted to go, so I was typing the address into the address bar.
    The problem is the existence in Safari of both an autocomplete that picks sites from your history (so I can expect that if I type “reader.g” then “reader.google.com” will pop up) and also a feature which automatically adds the “.com” if you leave it off the address (so for instance, even with my history cleared, if I type “cnn” into the address bar, it decides that I want “http://www.cnn.com.” If you type a few letters and hit return, it’ll go to “thosefewletters.com” if there is such a place.

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  3. meizitang Avatar
    meizitang

    I mostly rely on the googles automatic correction.

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  4. Robin Avatar
    Robin

    I guess the caffeine hadn’t hit my brain yet. I meant that even if I know exactly where I want to go, I type it in Google so I can see the precise link I want, and then click that. The Google search has a memory, too, so that if I type “accu” it will give me the choice of “accuweather” to search for.

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