<p>Why does this page rank so highly in google?</p>

Posted by: Ben Mullinger 26 Oct 2005

<p>Given his iconic status in the world of computing, I think we should let Donald Knuth have the deciding vote. At <a href="http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/email.html"><a href="http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/email.html">http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/email.html</a></a> he says <br /> "Newly coined nonce words of English are often spelled with a hyphen, but the hyphen disappears when the words become widely used. For example, people used to write ``non-zero'' and ``soft-ware'' instead of ``nonzero'' and ``software''; the same trend has occurred for hundreds of other words. Thus it's high time for everybody to stop using the archaic spelling ``e-mail''. Think of how many keystrokes you will save in your lifetime if you stop now! The form ``email'' has been well established in England for several years, so I am amazed to see Americans being overly conservative in this regard. (Of course, ``email'' has been a familiar word in France, Germany, and the Netherlands much longer than in England --- but for an entirely different reason.)"<br /> Of course, it is all pretty academic for him as he gave up email 15 years ago.</p>

Posted by: Pete 15 Mar 2005

<p>The hyphen should be used to link or separate WORDS, since the "E" is not a word but an abbreviation of the word "Electronic" I suggest that the correct use should be "E'mail" - the apostrophy used to indicate the omission of letters or numbers. I'm sure that THAT will never happen so the use of the hyphen in "E-mail" should end.</p>

Posted by: Tom 18 Feb 2005

<p>Since your original item about the SamPoll, the plot has thickened.</p> <p>The story begins with a humble hyphen. A small software company created an online poll, <a href="http://sampoll.com/"><a href="http://sampoll.com/">http://sampoll.com/</a></a> to settle the question of how to spell email -- to hyphenate or not to hyphenate, that was the question.</p> <p>That little, innocent question (See "Do you, um...hyphenate?" at MessagingPipeline.com <a href="http://www.messagingpipeline.com/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=57703800)"><a href="http://www.messagingpipeline.com/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=57703800)">http://www.messagingpipeline.com/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=57703800)</a></a> triggered a chain reaction of other questions, and revelations about big business, big tech, big search engines.</p> <p>Question -- Do the literary and tech communities have a different word-view? Roy Blount Jr argues strongly for preserving the hyphen. "The father of network email", Ray Tomlinson says it's time to eliminate the hyphen. Prof. Doug Hofstadter, whose Pulitizer Prize winning book inspired thousands to go into computer science and Artificial Intelligence, admitted that he usually didn't bother with the hyphen, but, thinking more about it, concluded that he should be true to his principles and put one in. Hofstadter said he will abide by the poll's outcome.</p> <p>Revelation -- As of Sunday, in response to a columnist asking about the SamPoll, an AOL spokesman announced that AOL favors the hyphen. This puts AOL at odds with Google and the tech community in general. (See the Sunday column by Lonnie Brown in The Ledger, "Email or E-mail: Pesky or Crucial Hyphen" <a href="http://www.theledger.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20050213/COLUMNISTS0203/502130333/1089/BUSINESS"><a href="http://www.theledger.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20050213/COLUMNISTS0203/502130333/1089/BUSINESS">http://www.theledger.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20050213/COLUMNISTS0203/502130333/1089/BUSINESS</a></a></p> <p>Question -- Will other e-businesses weigh in on this question? Some have a stake in it. eBay for example goes hyphen-less, and prefers email to be hyphen-less. Steve Jobs probably doesn't realize the Apple website gives prospective consumers ten times as many products and features for one spelling over the other. Bill Gates spells it two different ways at his personal website. Business and tech leaders have made all kinds of arguments, pro and con, at SamPoll.com (see lower left of the screen, scrolling views).</p> <p>Revelation -- Even savvy tech people thought it didn't matter how the word was spelled, but everyone is surprised by a SamPoll discovery: If you do a Google, Yahoo!, Ask Jeeves, Lycos or other search using different spellings of the e-word, you get very different results. All have an email glitch. If you want to know how seriously out of whack the big search engines can be, consider these recent Google results:</p> <p>If you search using "E-mail OR email" you get 59,100,000 results<br /> If you search using "E-mail AND email" you get 61,400,000 results<br /> If you search using "E-mail" you get 63,600,000 results<br /> If you search using "Email" you get 648,000,000 results</p> <p><br /> Revelation -- Another discovery about the big search engines is that their listings of articles and other "results" fluctuate by hundreds of millions from one day to the next. Within hours yesterday at Google, the listing of "e-mail" went from 63 million to 1.12 billion! It does raise questions. Can journalists and scholars do "comprehensive" research through the search engines? Search engines want to replace our nation's libraries? Can you imagine the uproar if a library misplaced hundreds of millions of articles overnight? </p> <p>Today at a Linux trade show in Boston, IntelliReach (sponsor of the SamPoll) is giving out buttons "Save the Hyphen" and "Kill the Hyphen," urging visitors to vote in the poll. </p> <p>But the story has become bigger than the spelling of the e-word. A humble hyphen is producing lots of question marks.</p> <p>Todd Domke</p>

Posted by: Todd Domke 16 Feb 2005