Technomaly

A couple of Harvard boys took a survey of typosquatting web sites — sites that take advantage of common misspellings — and found nearly 1 million sites taking advantage of the top 3,264.

All those sites mean a whopping $497 million in ad revenue for Google.

To the researchers, Google’s funding and ad placement goes against the search giant’s “Do No Evil” mission.

So what’s the harm in typosquatting? First, typosquatting confuses consumers, causing them to visit sites different than the ones they intended to visit.

Second, site operators must pay large sums of money to ad platforms such as Google AdWords in order to reach the users who specifically requested the corresponding sites.

Third, we found evidence that ad platforms exacerbate typosquatting. Using regression analysis, we determined that websites in categories with higher pay-per-click ad prices face more typosquatting than websites whose keywords fetch lower ad prices.

We’ve likely all been caught by these types of sites at one point or another, and it really is annoying, but who knew people were making so much money off of what amounts to polluting the internet. I’m skeptical, but as more information like this comes out, hopefully things will change.

European internet laws limit these types of practices.

[Via Measuring Typosquatting Perpetrators and Funders