Rohini Parab

A long unmarked paper ribbon lying flat and parallel to the lens on a bare tabletop, its nearer end slightly rolled, a single amber lamp low on the left picking out that roll and the fibre, one shadow reaching out rightward, the tabletop past it sinking to black

Rohini covers the part of this subject that looks like carelessness and is not: the strings people actually type.

JaiHo 777

The strings beat

The spelling entry, the numbers entry, the sentence people search and the spin entry are hers.

Her starting position is that a widely typed misspelling is not a mistake. One person mistyping a word is a mistake. Thousands of people typing the same wrong word have all copied it from the same place, and that place is the finding.

JaiHo 777

The thing she wants people to notice

The double dash.

People search a string with two hyphens sitting in the middle of it. Nobody puts a double dash in a search box from memory — it arrives by copying, which means the string was read somewhere as a name and reproduced as a name, punctuation included.

Once you know that, a whole class of long searches becomes legible. They are not attempts at precision. They are page headlines, taken for product names, retyped by people who thought they were being careful.

JaiHo 777

Her disagreement with the rest of the desk

She thinks the register is too kind to autocomplete.

Her argument: a search box that suggests a misspelling is not neutrally reporting what people type, it is teaching the misspelling to the next person, and the loop closes without anyone deciding anything. Whether a page should say that in those terms is an argument the four of us have not finished having, which is why it is on her profile rather than in the register.

Checked by Rohini Parab · Spellings, search strings and drift