Do Yahoo Users Spell Better then Google Users?

Statistically speaking, it’s likely that you (whoever you are) use Google for most of your searches.  That’s fine – and I’m right there with you – but new information suggests that people who use Yahoo are better spellers.  Wo is us!

In a thread on the Cre8asite Forums, John Mueller posted the evidence.  “Looking at my logs, I noticed that an average of 5 to 6% of all visitors from Google used the spell-correction to make it to my site (this is the same across several sites, the rest of the numbers are from one site only for the last 6 months),” he writes.

“Of all my Yahoo users, only 1.8% used the spelling correction . . . which could mean that either Yahoo users know how to spell or Yahoo doesn’t correct misspellings that well, or perhaps even, that Yahoo sends users to the proper search results even if the query is misspelled,” Mueller continues.  “I wonder which one it is?”

So do I.  In that same Cre8asite thread, Bill Slawski, “rynert,” and “Mano70” posted similar statistics, and on Search Engine Roundtable, Barry Schwartz says he may add even more.  This presumably creates a fairly large sample size that spreads across several demographics; something’s definitely at work here.

Yet, having proofread this article several times (and having left the misspelled “woe” in place on purpose), I’ll leave the speculation to someone else – perhaps a Yahoo user.