Tesco Direct: Separating spell checks

Apparent lapses in literacy result when search engine and content providers work from different dictionaries.

The Site

Tesco Direct, the online store of leading UK supermarket chain Tesco, has a syntax-sensitive product search engine that detects incorrect usage, and presents results based on the most likely correct alternative. It does not, however, prevent basic errors appearing on the site or point to them.

For example, typing in the wrongly spelled word ‘seperate’ prompts the response “We couldn’t find anything to match your search for ‘seperate’ But we have found items for ‘separate’”. This contradicts the site itself, where the incorrect ‘seperate’ is used regularly in product sales prompts and descriptions (for example, four of the 24 Desktop PCs & Monitors items include “Save £xx off Total Seperate Selling Price”). These are not picked up by the search.

The Takeaway

Tesco was a pioneer of online shopping in the UK and has rightly been praised and flattered by imitators for the development of Tesco Direct. But the bigger the success the bigger the potential for devilment in the detail, as the site’s contradictory handling of seperate/separate shows.

Whoever is responsible for the search engine is clearly working with a dictionary as back up, and assumes that those providing content for the site have their own copy. Hence the built-in correction for ‘seperate’ – it discounts the possibility that Tesco would use the wrong spelling. Clearly, though, this is not the case, and there is equally obviously a lack of any mechanism, either automated (such as a document spell checker) or editorial, to catch the resulting errors.

Apparent lapses in literacy online are both embarrassing and inexcusably persistent, but they can also be more directly damaging. In Tesco’s case, it is weakening the promotion of special offers and thus, potentially, of sales. And, as its well-known advertising slogan regularly tells British television viewers, “every little helps”.

First published on 02 January, 2007