The stupidity of crowds

There's plenty of talk about the wisdom of crowds, but what about the opposite — what about the stupidity of crowds? What about the power of our collective mistakes? Certainly some people make a buck off of this: Las Vegas survives on our collective inability to understand probability in a cold, rationale way. But my favorite example is how Google handles misspellings. I'm an attrotious attrocious atrocious speller. Therefore, I'm a pro on spell checkers. But before going into how Google helps me, let's first look at the typically word processing application. It finds words not in its dictionary and then suggests other words that are a letter or two off from the non-word that you spelled. Instead, Google looks at the other searches for the same exact non-word, and what people searched for immediately afterwards. It puts together all the mistakes and recoveries of previous users, and offers it to you as your suggested route to recovery. And that's why I now go to Google when I can't spell a word, and MS Word isn't helping me. Chances are, people spelled the word phonetically just like me, and I'll benefits from their collective mistakes.