How many goodly creatures are there here!

How beauteous mankind is
O brave new world,
That has such people in't

A not insignificant part of our everyday brave new world is Google. If, for example, you're not sure where my quotation comes from, all you have to do is Google it and you'll learn that it's The Tempest, of course.

Unless you misspell something.

Google is, after all, a program running on a machine. It isn't thinking. And that program now checks the spelling of your search terms, and asks

"Did you mean: gastroenterologist"

if you demonstrate that you don't know how to spell a doctor of the gut.

But Google also does something else: It immediately returns all of the web pages where your misspelling is found.

So: I suppose it had to happen. This company will (for a fee) establish "up to several hundred custom pages" for you, on which they have entered misspelled words or phrases. That you've bought. Five words or phrases costs $349 plus $49 per month. (They promise not to sell the same words to more than five customers.)

They establish the pages and, presumably, when you click on them, you are redirected right on through to their customer's page.

This is a variation of the "Brad Pitt's naked butt" problem. If you talk about an article or other website, and say something like "I suppose it wouldn't have been so bad, but I didn't really want to look at naked pictures of Paris Hilton," you'll suddenly discover that you're getting a whole pile of traffic looking for, well, you get the idea.

But I guess what I don't really understand is why I want a bunch of traffic from people who don't know how to spell "optinizatiom," or "optimizatino," or "optimizatoin," or "optimizaiton," or whatever the heck it is.