Bad Spelling Pays on eBay

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Posted by ryuzaki0 on Wednesday January 28, 2004 @01:36AM from the know-duhh dept.

peebeejay writes "People say that as long as they're understood, spelling is unimportant. These people are unwittingly making others a lot of money online, according to this article in the NY Times (DNA sample and clean boxers required). So, aside from clarity and respect for your reader, there's another good reason to either spell correctly or use a spellchecker: get bidders to find your eBay items and give you their money! Or you can go ahead and see how many people bid on your 'labtop computers,' 'camras,' and 'earings.'"

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Reg Free by swordboy · 2004-01-28 01:41 · Score: 4, Informative

Here

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Life is the leading cause of death in America.
Re:This article is ridiculous by ewwhite · 2004-01-28 01:42 · Score: 4, Informative

Try again....
Search for "labtop" on ebay :)

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Edmund White
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Re:It works the other way, too by Anonymous Coward · 2004-01-28 01:46 · Score: 2, Informative

Did you bother reading the article? This is exactly what the article is about. Clearly those that moderated you didn't bother, either.
L@@K!!1!! NYT ARTICAL WITHOUT REJESTRATION!!!1! by squiggleslash · 2004-01-28 01:52 · Score: 5, Informative

For those who don't want to sell their organs to read this, visit the link searched for in Google and click on the link to the article. This works in general for NYT articles - Google search for the link, and when you get the "nothing found, would you like to try the link?" page, just click on the link. It's 'cos the NYT uses a Referer check or something.
This valuable piece of advice given in the spirit of the article - ie with a crappy header that'll ensure only people looking really hard will find it.
Bidding starts at $5.

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You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Re:use a search engine spell checker by marauder404 · 2004-01-28 01:57 · Score: 3, Informative

They do use a spell checker, but I don't think it's quite as effective or aggressive about matching as a Google's. For example, eBay figures out that you've mis-spelled "compaq" as "compac" but doesn't catch the mis-spelling of "labtop" and recommend the correctly-spelled version. Google finds both of these.
Re:This article is ridiculous by Safety+Cap · 2004-01-28 01:57 · Score: 2, Informative

I found 425 "language challenged" knive sellers.
Obligatory nerd tie-in: That's why Mozilla kicks IE's little tin arse. Quicklink "dict knive" --> no entry for knive.

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Yeah, right.
Re:use a search engine spell checker by platypussrex · 2004-01-28 02:03 · Score: 3, Informative

I know this is slashdot, but if you RTFA you will see the following quote:

Jim Griffith, whose official title at eBay is dean of eBay education, teaches 40 to 50 seminars a year around the country. Although eBay points out common misspellings, he said that the most common question he gets is, "When will e-Bay get a spell checker?"

His answer? "You go to a store called a bookstore, and you buy something called a dictionary."
Use the asterisk by blackmonday · 2004-01-28 04:10 · Score: 2, Informative

I hate to give this one away, but you're all my friends so what they hell. Search using an asterisk. Example - If you're looking for sony headphones, type in "sony head*" and it finds anything with the word head and sony in it. I get stuff cheap all the time, because this trick can get the spelling mistake listings.
Re:I check for this on purpose by samhalliday · 2004-01-28 04:34 · Score: 2, Informative

we speak "British English" everywhere in Ireland, not just the north, of course we call it "English" and your strange ways we call "American English". i would only ever say "British English" when speaking to an American, for emphasis.
most late-period colonial countries are the same (i know they all set their dictionaries to "British English" in South Africa at least)