I logged into my Pinterest account via my laptop today and found that Pinterest auto-corrected search is fixing my misspelled words! Phew! One step closer to dumb. For a long time I have not had to spell well to find what I want on Google, now I no longer have to have a grip on my grammar to look at photos of future dinners, home décor tips, and my next Pinterest planned vacation!
I meant to search for “infographics” but hastily typed in “infogrphics” (missing the letter’a’). Pinterest promptly suggested I should check my typing and offered up a corrected version [Figure 1]. I misspelled the word in the search bar. Pinterest guessed at my intended search term, showed me what it thought I wanted, and asked me if I really wanted to search for “infogrphics?” Well of course, I don’t, or DO I?
Marketers sometimes use typos and misspellings as part of their pay-per-click (PPC) and search engine optimization (SEO) campaigns. It is a way to net cheaper clicks on ad platforms such as Google AdWords. That does not seem to be a realistic marketing strategy for Pinterest.
I’ve strayed away from desktop Pinterest and been using Pinterest’s mobile apps – on both Android and iOS. Trying again, I searched for “recpe” as a misspelling of the popular Pinterest topic “recipe.” Below is snapshot taken from an iPod [Figure 2].
The misspelling of “recpe” returns the exact results as the corrected version of “recipe.” On mobile devices, Pinterest users are not given the option to use the misspelling or choose the Pinterest suggested correction. On desktop Pinterest, the misspelling and corrected version return different results. The desktop misspelling page does not display the carousel of sub-categories [Figure 3].