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Bad Spelling Pays on eBay
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.'"
to tell me that they aren't called "labtop" computers? ... you could've fooled my dad.
I write code.
I've been using this trick since I started using eBay, something like six years ago. When you look for something, always look for misspellings first, because you're less likely to have competition. Even got a gemstone or two this way.
It's been known for years, and it hasn't changed much. I don't think this article is going to cause much of a change, even if it's widely read.
.. whenever I use ebay, I always try "alternative" spellings of words. Of course, being from the UK, I'm used to spelling things like 'color' incorrectly [its a JOKE!] :-)
Simon
Physicists get Hadrons!
Here
Life is the leading cause of death in America.
According to the article, Mother of Perl is spelled incorrectly. Shows what they know.
Search for "labtop" on ebay :)
Edmund White
http://flickr.com/ewwhite
Is the glass half empty? Is the glass half full? No! The glass is simply too big! What ever happened to rewarding those who did things well, as opposed to making sure nobody gets their feelings hurt because they don't do something as well as someone else. I heard that in some schools they're not running spelling bees anymore because it makes the kids that don't win feel too bad.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Did you bother reading the article? This is exactly what the article is about. Clearly those that moderated you didn't bother, either.
Some years ago I purchased a 36 gigabyte 10,000 RPM Fiber Channel drive very inexpensively on e-bay. Drives like it were selling for two or three hundred dollars and I paid $40 for mine. Why? Because I intially spelled Fiber Channel as fibre channel.
There were two or three fiber channel products with british spelling and I think I was the only one that even bid on them.
You too, can find great deals on Sorny, Magnetbox, JCV, Keenwood. All because the manufacturer didn't spell the name right. (read "knock-offs")
But seriously, now are we going to have people naming their auctions:
Brand New Laptop Labtop Latpod Palpot PC!
?
www.facebook.com/DareDefendOurRights
www.fairtax.org
A friend of mine (whose website I host) is terrible. But at least his pictures of the "rockafella center" get him on the first page of Google! :)
I used to be a good speller, but I use Google A LOT. And it is so forgiving that my skills have declined. I expect all programs to know what I mean when I type "Jva prgfamminh boolks". I just kinda hit the keys that basically represent the words I want.
No, the article is about people who leach off eBay, by buying misspelled items and selling them at a profit. I'm a genuine buyer, whose own genuine bad spelling has led me to bargains. Thats not the same.
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
unnix licsene for olny $699!!1!
I was looking for a BikeE recumbent bike. There weren't any on Ebay. I tried "Bike-E" with a hyphen. There was an almost brand new demo model listed for $500. (They retailed for about $1200 at the time, I think.) I bought it, didn't even take it out of the box, relisted it with the correct spelling, and sold it for $850 seven days later. (I did have to pay for the bike to be shipped to me, which was about $35, I think.) I have also found that you can buy items that are poorly described and relist them with more thorough descriptions, links to the manufacturer's website, better photos, etc., and they will typically sell for higher than you paid for them.
Athelon, Athlon, Athalon, or equally correct but alternative spellings P3, Pentium 3 Pentium III...etc.
I think I will wait a few weeks and do some bargain shoping.
When the people fear their government, there is tyranny; when the government fears the people, there is liberty.
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.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Yell & scream & rant & rave... it's no use... you need a shaaaave ~ Bugs Bunny
...is why Microsoft could make the claim that people would go to mikerowesoft.com and get confused.
Because people are that fucking stupid.
That having been said, I wound up with a MITS Altair for $100 because it was listed as "Vintage Altar Comp", and a "sonydcv1" for about $300.
My point being that as geeks, we should encourage all non-geeks we know who have an interest in selling items on eBay to forgo spellchecks and not worry about spelling in general. We stand to profit from it! Any attempt to educate the general populace (as this NYT article attempts to do) will reduce the number of magic bargains to be found on eBay ;)
Almost always a good deal in that category.
PHEM - party like it's 1997-2003!
No need for the shhh!, methinks -- the NYT article describes exactly the same thing
Yeah, but no-one reads the article, it was still a secret...
I believe posters are recognized by their sig. So I made one.
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.
Obligatory nerd tie-in: That's why Mozilla kicks IE's little tin arse. Quicklink "dict knive" --> no entry for knive.
Yeah, right.
That'll be 'surprised' :P
:(
I know, I know, sorry
On another note, I wouldn't mind seeing more attractive female lab workers around here wearing snug "labtops"...
The owls are not what they seem
A story on Slashdot about accurate spelling! And referring to eBay no less! Oh, the irony!
This is the first article about eBay where the editors haven't spelt (yes, "spelt" not "spelled") the company name as "Ebay".
Somehow, they alway (well, almost always) manage to correctly spell iMac, iPod and iTunes, but eBay, nVidia and ATi often become "Ebay", "Nvidia" and "ATI". It would be nice to think that this article was the start of a trend but I seriously doubt it.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
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."
experts say the Internet -- with its discussion boards, blogs and self-published articles -- is a treasure trove of bad spelling.
They had to ask experts?
Daniel
Hurry up and jump on the individualist bandwagon!
Making money off of mispellings? Slashdot's been doing it for years!
-- Political fascism requires a Fuhrer.
Homer: "Look at these low, low prices on famous brand name electronics!"
Bart: "Don't be a sap, Dad. These are just crappy knock-offs."
Homer: "I know a genuine Panaphonics when I see it. And look, there's Magnetbox, and Sorny!"
D6 63 0D 70 89 81 BB 8E 7B 7C 5F 5D 54 EA AB 73
His answer? "You go to a store called a bookstore, and you buy something called a dictionary."
Why ?
Trolling using another account since 2005.
I remember back in the early days of the web, when it was just becoming popular, that John Dvorak hailed it as the coming of true mass literacy. His belief was that with so many average every day citizens posting web pages, surely this would lead to increased literacy.
It couldn't have been a year later that he retracted that prediction and instead said that the web has proven just how illiterate Americans (and I presume others) are.
Anyway, just thought I'd toss in my little anecdote.
You gotta watch those typos, knowing how much fraud is on Ebay. I declined to bid on a low priced laptop because the S&H was $1500, not $15.00, and I didn't hear back from the seller until after the auction closed. No way I was going to take that chance. Too bad, because the final price was good (maybe others also declined to bid),
Just as importantly, it wasn't reinforced. Kind of like the lady who felt reassured by seeing "chandaleer" on hundreds of web sites, people whose reading consists primarily of web pages, e-mail, and chat (rather than books vetted by proofreaders) are learning to spell incorrectly. It's like the blind leading the blind. I've got nothing against spelling changes in principle; language is going to evolve. But this seems more like a case of language forking, almost geometrically.
Ironically, the internet seems to be taking us back a few centuries, to the days before English spellings were standardized by the likes of Webster and other lexicographers. Which was fine back when all parsing of text was done by humans, who could easily figure out that "Thomas Smith" and "Tomas Smythe" were the same person. But as this article points out, it can be a problem when more literal computers are concerned.
You sure you don't mean this link?
LOL! Priceless - look at the description for http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item =3456315281&category=177
Choice quotes
"I am not lying when I say that this labtop is hands down one of the fastest computers I have ever seen in my entire life. On the other hand, I am also completely clueless when it comes to computers so please bare with me."
Oo-er - are we getting our clothes off together? (It's "BEAR with me")
"keyboard has more buttons than I know what to do with"
"a floppy drive, a CD rom drive, and another drive that I have no clue what to do with"
"And...a rechargable battery"
"some disk that I suppose you'll probably need"
and to top it off "Chances are that you'll probably want to run this computer by a shop and get it cleaned out"
Then he says "if you have any questions email me." Yeah, like he's really going to have a clue amout MHz, GB, serial ports etc. I wouldn't recommend asking anything more difficult than: "What colour is it?"
He also can't spell "I nicked it" - he says "this is not my computer (I'm selling it for a friend)"
I've always said that the best (and worst) thing about eBay is that it's full of stupid people. It's not just bad spelling that can get you the bargains, often people under-price their "Buy it now" items, or advertise things incorrectly, i.e. "This laptop has a 500MHz processor", but the model number they've stated suggests it's a 1GHz.
This 'feature' isn't going to go away because the NYT has mentioned it. The problem comes from clueless people, who will still be clueless now! I doubt people deliberately mis-spell items on eBay and now are thinking "perhaps I should spell things correctly from now on"
P.S. Remember to take full advantage, if you find cluelessness on eBay, "View Seller's Other Items" might be your key to many more bargains!
perl -e 'print "Just another Perl newbie\n";'
At first I enjoyed the stories posted in this topic: "I saw a Rolex listed on eBay under Rollex. Bought it from the idiot for $10, turned around and sold it for $500. What a loser!"
Then I started to think: what if instead of trying to make a few bucks off of someone's typo, why not email them and tell them about the error? Here on Slashdot there is endless (and justified) ranting about the greed of corporate officers and their PHB minions. But are picking up a dollar off the floor in 7-11 and pocketing it even though you saw who dropped it or pulling these eBay spelling error tricks or laying off 1000 programmers to boost your stock price before cashing in your options not all acts from the same human motivation?
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
Just add a line at the bottom of your listings with all possible misspellings of the main keywords.
What?
Whoever "explained" that to you was obviously a beardy loon, and either:
1. one of those people who want to declare Essex an Aryan enclave.
2. a schitzophrenic who thought he was King Arthur.
3. Trolling.
Point two reminds me of a time about a year ago when this black guy got on the bus dressed in a blanket and announced to everybody that he was Braveheart, and was engaged in a centuries-long struggle against the English, which none of us would understand, because we were too young.
evil math within Nature's Cubic Creation!
Clever signature text goes here.
...how many of us went to EBay immediately after reading this article and did a search for 'labtop'?
The registration is free and you don't even need a valid e-mail address. What's with the complaints? The 20 seconds you have to spend *once* to input bogus information is certainly a fair price for the online content of the NYT.
Sheesh. People here would complain if you hung them with a new rope.
No... 'Earings are what they 'ave in the 'Ouse of Commons, guv'nor.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
That's not leeching. If somebody cannot be bothered to get a dictionary and look up the correct spelling of a word when they want to put out an advertisement that could be seen by millions of people, then to my mind they deserve what they get. You play with fire, you get burned.
You might not get far appearing on TV if you're ugly, and you might not get far on the wireless if you have an annoying voice. But anyone can learn to spell properly -- the only thing stopping them is laziness.
Actually there probably is a market for someone to charge a fee for checking spelling and usage {that would require a human being; a machine can spot "tehre" but "their" is a correctly-spelt word even if you meant "there"} -- because at some point, the benefit due to proper spelling would be greater than the amount you spent on it.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
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.
It's incredible to me that this late in the GUI game, I still can't just select text anywhere in Windows, right-click and select "Check Spelling". Anyone hook this up for GNOME yet?
At Apple, we developed a "styled text pane" GUI component for a hypermedia documentation browser (not HTML, in 1993) as part of the corporate switch to a C++ toolkit. We threw hooks for spellcheck and themes (a la CSS) into the class, and argued that the component ought to be part of the toolkit itself, for *every* text display in the OS, which would mean every app, entirely standard. I heard that the design was part of Apple's plans right through the demise of the Bento initiative, which drowned our approach like a rat on the Titanic. So now every app reinvents the wheel, and it takes forever to crawl back to steel-belted radials.
--
make install -not war
I almost got a killer deal on a miror universe one time. Some jerk outbid me, though.
PERL:
All of the power of Voodoo with most of the understandibility!
I woke up to the news that some people went canoeing yesterday, during a wind advisory, without life vests, and apparently not knowing how to swim, and one guy drowned. Not to be callous about such a tragedy, but the phrase "survival of the fittest" did cross my mind.
I think this story beats mine, though.
The phrase that starts "a fool an his money..." also seems to apply.
(Oh, and I spell checked this because I'm smart enough to know I'm stupid.)
I think it's a liability for the seller, but a windfall for the buyer. For example, I was searching for a rare item that was part of a series of collectables named after the "millennium". The seller had the product misspelled as "milennium" and had much fewer bids and I was able to pick it up for a fraction of its worth. I guess it depends upon whether you want the buyer or seller to be uneducated. The former works if you're trying to scam someone; the latter works if you're looking for a good deal.
but if i can't spell dictioanarie how do i get one off ebay?