I’ve just made an exciting discovery – you can gauge someone’s or something’s popularity in the realm of human society by finding how Google can home in on it when searching a term vaguely resembling the actual spelling of the thing. The further the search term is from the actual spelling, the more popular the thing is. Search for Chira Naitli and you’ll see what I mean.
I’ll try to update the following list of examples as I go…
It comes to me now that there might be an alternative explanation for this phenomenon: Italians suck at spelling things 
In any case, this might open new fantatic opportunities, such as badmouthing someone or something - e.g. Mec Donald or Maicrosoft - and not getting sued for it. Probably a new crypto code, I talk about something and you use Google to decypher what I mean. Things like “I hate Appel“, “Folcsvaghen sucks”, or “do not vote for Illari Clinto“.
So, here’s Gabe’s Law # 1 on human popularity:
The popularity of something is directly proportional to the maximum Levenshtein distance between the thing’s spelling and an alternative spelling understood by Google.
There you are. Now I wanna see how long it takes until someone capitalizes on my law.
Update (September 15 2009): apparently, the very existence of this post skewed Google’s results and now it thinks that “Chira Naitli” is a real entry rather than an (italian-ish) mispelling for Keira Knightley. Same goes for “Uindos” and a few others. LOL, the power of a paragraph
