Misspelling Generator - Linda Hilfling "Google's mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful." www.google.com/intl/en/corporate/index.html A search engine is presented as an objective tool, although obviously it is its underlying code which defines the possible outcomes. An integral part of the Google search engine is the spelling control which suggests alternative words if it suspects that you have been misspelling your search terms, prompting "Did you mean: ..." However, ignoring the suggested corrections, misspellings in Google can be a gateway to an alternative world. When doing a search in the Chinese version of Google on the Tiananmen Square Massacre, I discovered a temporary loophole out of the Google self-censorship in China. By deliberately spelling Tiananmen incorrectly, I was taken to web-pages where other people had misspelled Tiananmen, and was thereby able to access pictures of demonstrations as well as the legendary image of the student in front of the tank through the sources of incorrect spellings. An act of accidental activism - by writing variations like "tianamen" and "tiananman" the isolation politics of the Google spelling corrector was subverted. In order to take advantage of this informational grey-zone of misspellings, I have developed a misspelling generator. It is an alternative search engine which collects data from Google's searchresults and returns with a list of misspellings of a current search term. When a user enters a search term, the "Did you mean:" list in Google, transforms into "Have you tried:", which features a list of deviations - misspellings from that term, ordered according to the amount of hits available for each misspelling. It is possible to select one of the misspellings, taking the user to a random page featuring the term. So far the misspelling search engine only existed as a command line tool, but together with Erik Borra I created a web-version of it. It is now available as a Firefox plugin. Follow the hyperlink to visit the project at Misspelling Generator UPDATE: Linda Hilfling wins 'best young designer' award 2008! With her project "The Misspelling Generator" Hilfling is awarded as 'best young designer 2008' at the International Design Biennale 2008 in St- Étienne. Impakt proudly congratulates Linda Hilfling with this achievement. |
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