Americans Can’t Spell “Barack Obama”

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Inauguration Day 2009 is finally here, but Americans still can't spell "Barack Obama", at least not according to GooseGrade.

GooseGrade is a service that allows readers to post corrections for grammar, spelling and factual errors on blogs and other online media outlets using a free widget.

GooseGrade did some quick and dirty research and found at least 60 million pages on the Internet with Obama’s first name misspelled. “Barak” is the most common misspelling, followed in close second by “Barrak”, and finally “Barrack”. It’s one “r”, a “c” and a “k,” for those still having trouble. The startup even counted web sites intentionally placing misspelled ‘meta-tags’ or keywords into the site code of their pages to pick up traffic from misspelled searches.

GooseGrade points out that thousands of bloggers and other online authors will miss out on incoming search traffic by misspelling Obama’s name, although they fail to note the fact many Americans will probably also search for the wrong terms and that search engines already take the misspellings into account when serving up results.