According to a recent blog post by Bill Tancer, General Manager of Global Research at Hitwise, the third most popular political candidate search term (as of February 3) was "hilary clinton." Yes, that's "hilary" with one "l." The fifth most popular term was "barak obama."
You may be wondering why anyone should care that people can't spell the names of political candidates. Well, the answer is simple. If your organization participates in any kind of search engine marketing program, like Google AdWords, you should take a moment to record common misspellings of your most popular keywords. For example, let's say your organization's name is potato salad. While it makes sense to bid on keywords like "potato," "deli salads," "foods with mayonnaise," it's also a good idea to throw in "potatoe" and "potatos." Chances are, if you type in one of these mispellings, most search engines will come back with a "Did you mean: potatoes". However, suppose your organization has a more esoteric name, like "cascadia." You can't rely on super smart search engines to guess what people really meant to type, so it makes sense to bid on "cascadiea," "cascadea," etc.
The alternative could be an internet wide spelling bee...
