Google has a massive partnership with the NFL thanks to YouTube TV’s $2 billion per year Sunday Ticket package. But perhaps the search engine giant should have set aside some money for some simple spell-check software.
A day after the Washington Commanders drafted reigning Heisman Trophy winner Jayden Daniels No. 2 overall, there were news stories and features everywhere on the former LSU star. One could find these stories by searching Google for “Jayden Daniels.”
A search for that on Friday returned an incredible 51 million results for … Jaden Daniels.
Yes, the world’s most revered and most-used search engine misspelled the budding NFL star’s name. A quick check of other search engines, including Yahoo!, DuckDuckGo, and Bing showed they all have the correct “Jayden” spelling.
Google is not infallible, of course. In February, the company apologized after its Gemini AI tool returned historically inaccurate images, depicting America’s founding fathers as Black, for example.
While some accused Google of nefarious purposes for those errors, simply misspelling a top NFL prospect’s name seems trivial by comparison, especially when “Jaden” is a common spelling (NBA players Jaden Ivey, Jaden Hardy and Jaden McDaniels, actor/rapper Jaden Smith, etc.)
Still, it’s baffling that such an authoritative source as Google could consistently get Daniels’ name wrong at a time when his name is everywhere in the news, and all the source stories the search engine returns spell his name correctly.
