Blu-Ray Name Can Misspelling "Blue-Ray" Hurt "Blueray"?

We have noticed that there is a lot of confusion about blu-ray (Blue-ray) spelling. Almost 50% of all Blu-ray searches in Google are done with Blue-ray or Blueray. And within the misspelled searches, Blue-ray is about 80% and Blueray is the other 20%. The numbers from Overture for july are 26708 searches for Blu-ray compared to 8618 for Blue-ray and 1082 for Bluray.

It was a choice made by the Blu-ray disc association to remove the "e" from blue-ray to be able to have a trademark on it. "Blue-ray disc" or "Blueray disc" would have not been so easy. We are wondering if people are searching half the time with "Blue-ray players" or "Blue-ray movies" or even worse "HD DVD vs. Blue-ray", if they are going to find what they are looking for? They will find results talking about blu-ray, but it''s going to be limited because of the pollution done by sites that have misspelled blu-ray themselves with blue-ray or blueray.

Google and the other search engines can make the translation between "blue-ray and blu-ray" or "blueray and blu-ray" but it is certainly going to hurt the search result. The "did you mean" could have helped but websites writers are doing so much mistakes that there is enough results for "Blue-ray" that the "did you mean" doesn''t pop-up.

An ad by a major retail store in the newspapers last week was announcing the "Samsung Blue-ray player"! Talk about confusing people! All those people that did not knew about the technology are now convinced that the correct spelling is Blue-ray and not Blu-ray. They just run to their computer now and search for Blue-ray and find enough results just like if it was the correct spelling.

Blue-ray may look cool without the "e" but at this point, the only result they have is a major dilution of the internet traffic.

We took a look at the HD DVD camp if they had problems with HDDVD or HDVD. We found those results for july in Overture: 29299 searches for HD DVD against 1527 for HDDVD and only 515 for HDVD. We see that the HD DVD doesn''t have a misspelling problem like the blu-ray camp. We can certainly count that as a bonus for HD DVD in the "HD DVD vs. Blue-ray" war!

Stephane Dion cumulates 15 years of experience in technolgy development and writes about emerging consumer technologies. You can find other articles at Blu-ray Freak and HD DVD Freak