The Internet Grows Up – No More Sketchy Websites Which Love Bad Spellurs

I used to love when I typed a website too quickly and made a spelling mistake. Homail. Gogglw.com yagoo.com and so on (instead of hotmail.com , google.com, yahoo.com). Fun.

Invariably the internet would show me some weird catch-all website that listed categories of every noun that existed along the left (vesse, produce, letter openers, pajamas, Vatican, parasail), with a generic photo of an Asian and Caucasian in J. Crew-ish clothes on the right. Sometimes it would be a hiply-dressed person near (not always on) a computer and lots of financial services options in the menu. What was exciting was the surprise pairings of photo and strange categories (none of whose links led anywhere).

I’m still not sure how these scammy-looking redirect pages made money. They weren’t real websites. They didn’t look real. If you clicked on the links they just took you to another page with similar lists. They never seemed to link to any actual information or things you could buy. But *someone*, *somewhere* was paying operate these weird pages that were spelled one-letter off of other famous websites.

What was funnier was that they’d figured out that their target demographic was bad spellers. Maybe bad spellers were more likely to click links that led to other fake pages. Bad spellers must be dumb. I guess I am occasionally dumb, then, when I am in a rush or sleepy and can’t type properly.

Sadly, history has moved on and these types of pages are mostly extinct. The smart internet and the smart companies on the brilliant internet actually do a better job figring out which website you wanted. Now if I type homail.com or gogle.com it still takes me to the right place. So sad and disappointing. We are losing the element of adventure, surprise and randomness which made the internet an exciting NEW frontier in the 199-0s and early 2000′s. The wild west is becoming tame.

Like a baby who no longer talks ‘cute’, the internet is losing the charm of it’s early years as it grows into young adulthood. I, for one, will forever miss the sign of generic pages with one wrongly-spelled letter.

There is only one left, like the dodo bird… go enjoy it while you can, world!!!!

www.yotube.com

You’re welcome.