Royal fans have fallen for the oldest trick in the book — or rather, the oldest trick on the webpage. Ahead of the birth of Meghan Markle and Prince Harry's baby, the public is eager to know as many details as possible about the newest royal. Rather than wait for the birth and the ensuing announcement, which could be any day now, royal fanatics have been digging deep into the Royal Family's website in hopes of turning up some clues — and some think they did.
The site has pages for many members of the current family, so some suspect that one has already been set up for the baby-to-be. Princess Charlotte's URL ends with "princess-charlotte," so people have been trying out other names to see if anything turns up. What they found was that certain names (like Arthur, Alexander, or James) redirect users to the homepage, while others give an error message. So, naturally, some people are assuming that Markle's incoming bundle of joy will have one of the names that already seems to be set up on the website, but the theory has already been debunked.
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Turns out, this happened last April as well, ahead of the birth of Princess Louis. That time, people thought he would be called "Prince Albert" for similar reasons, but turns out there's a simple explanation.
“A large number of search term redirects were set up some time ago on royal.uk," a Palace spokesperson told Yahoo UK. "This was in order to improve user experience. For guidance you will note that other names preceded by ‘prince’ or ‘princess’ produce the same result."
We are well and truly nestled in Markle's late April due date, so royal fanatics are undeniably antsy. However, maybe these modern royals will announce their baby's birth in a more 2019 way: making him or her an account on Instagram.