URL typing errors earning Google $500 million a year?

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Google may be profiting from mistyped URLs to the tune of $500 million every year.

That's the cut a Harvard University study claims Google could be earning from revenue generated on so-called “typosquatting” websites.

Typosquatting is the practice of deliberately registering misspelled variants of common URLs, such as “gooogle.com” or “microsfot.com”. Many such sites earn an income through Google's keyword-generated advertising network, hoping to profit over time by from commonly made typos.

However, Google itself gets a portion of that advertising revenue, and Harvard's Tyler Moore and Benjamin Edelman believe that portion could be as high has half a billion dollars.

The pair first created an exhaustive list of likely typing erros for the 3,264 most popular .com websites determined by Alexa ranking – coming up with as many as 280 alternatives for each site for a total of around 900,000 potential URLs.

They then used crawling software to determine the likely advertising revenue for 285,000 of the sites, extrapolating the results to the wider web.

Assuming the patterns seen in the study sample are consistent, Moore and Edelman claim as many as 68 million people a day visit mistyped URLs. Based on the statistic that around 57 per cent of these sites use Google's pay-per-click advertising, the search giant could be earning as much as $497 million a year from the results.

The study was presented at the Financial Security and Data Cryptography conference in Tenerife recently, where Moore and Edelman said typosquatting was a lot more common than many people thought.

“If these typo domains were treated as a single website, that site would be ranked by Alexa as the 10th most popular website in the world,” the pair said in announcing the findings. “It would be more popular, in unique daily visitors, than twitter.com, myspace.com, or amazon.com”

Google says it is happy to remove advertising from typo websites, but only if requested to do so by the holder of the genuine domain. The search giant had revenues of $23 billion last year, 97 per cent of which came from advertising.

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