Poor Choice of Words #hashtag

This afternoon, I came across a full-page newspaper advertisement for "Bing for Schools". It was an advertisement for an advertisement-free search engine for schools. The irony does not stop there. The URL listed in the advertisement was http://scroogled.com/schools. As first, I thought it was a bit vulgar. To me, it seemed liked they were mashing "SCREW GOOGLE" into one neologism. Perhaps that is just my faulty mind, but I could not think of another explanation of how they crafted the URL.

Vaguely remembering the name from the newspaper, I typed in something that was very similar to http://scroogled.com to see what the website was like. Now, if I type www.gooogle.com or a dozen other misspellings, I will still end up at the standard Google search page. However, when I tried to visit the URL for Bing for Schools, it turned out that I forgot one important letter in the address. I arrived at a totally different website. Let's just say that I ended up at a website for searching for things that would not be appropriate for school.

I enjoy my PC. Windows works great for me. Office is really useful. I still have fond memories of Windows XP (best OS ever). I almost bought a Zune instead of an iPod. Still, everyone once in a while, Microsoft just messes things up. People can debate whether having a search engine without advertisements is a good idea. In fact, teaching students how to distinguish paid advertisements from less-biased publication is a useful skill. However, using the www.scroogled.com URL is probably a bad decision all around.