Search Trends - Search Engine Marketing

One of my pet peeves about the Yahoo/Overture keyword tool is how they combine misspellings, plurals, etc. to show a total for all the searches combined in one number. I'd much rather they broke it out so I could see how many people search on each variation of the keyword. That's why tools like Keyword Discovery and Wordtracker are so valuable--because they don't combine those variations. The problem with those other guys is that their samples are either outdated or very small in comparison to Yahoo's data. That's why you can't rely on one single source for your keyword research. Anyway, this isn't the real reason for this post. I wanted to mention the top 20 misspelled words over on the Yahoo Search Buzz blog. It's not going to be all that useful for most marketers--okay, it's totally useless--but it is kind of interesting to see what people are misspelling. Looks like mostly celebrity names...I must say, though, I find it somewhat disturbing how many people are searching for people like Weird Al and Barbara Streisand. Oh, and how about Britney Spears, who made it on the list twice, with two of the top 20 most common misspellings. I guess there are a lot of different ways to spell Britney, but everyone knows how to spell Spears.