Monday, March 12, 2007

Did You Mean Marijuana?

Zoran writes in the following:

Marijana is common name in many Slav languages but when you search on Google for Marijana or some combination you get:

Did you mean: marijuana

Sure, these are automated, but Zoran wonders if the youth is protected here. Fictional dramatization: Peter is 12 and searches for the name of 13 years old school crush Marijana in Google. Through this search, Peter is exposed to “marijuana,” wonders “What’s this?” and clicks on it. Two days later, forgetting about his school crush he follows up with the local drug dealer, demanding to be handed out “marijuana.” A year later, Peter is moving on to harder drugs and drops out of school, living a life in misery, and...

Nah. I guess there’s more dangerous things in kid’s lives than Google spelling corrections. On the other hand, maybe Google can properly “localize” their algorithm used for spelling corrections?

[Thanks Zoran! Photo Creative Commons-licensed by IzaEus.]

Did You Mean Marijuana? by Philipp Lenssen | Comments (17)

>> More posts

Advertisement