Microsoft's anti-typosquatting ploy could hurt Google

Stuart Corner
Monday, 24 April 2006 09:08

IT Industry - Strategy

According to Internet research company, Ipwalk, Microsoft's latest initiative against 'typosquatters' could evolve and financially impact legitimate companies, such as Google, that serve ad pages.
Typosquatting is the practice of registering multiple domain names that are similar to popular legitimate names in order to attract traffic for advertising or nefarious purposes. According to Ipwalk, it is very big business. "Usually mistyped domain names will lead visitors to ad pages and in some cases even to adult web sites. They can also be used for more sinister purposes, such as phishing.

Ipwalk notes that Microsoft Research recently added a 'Typo-Patrol' feature to its Strider URL Tracer software, a feature that helps web surfers track down and protect themselves against common typo variations of domain names. "Microsoft’s initiative could be the beginning of the end for typo-squatting, which in turn could hurt providers of ad pages such as Sedo and Google who would lose exposure of their ad pages," it claims.

According to Ipwalk, "Microsoft's initiative to battle typo-squatters is in line with their recent focus on security issues. It is only a matter of time until the results of this and similar research projects are integrated as a security measure into web browsers and security applications. When that happens, companies serving ad pages are going to have to adapt or see a significant loss of income."

Ipwalk's research shows typosquatters controlling a significant share of global domain names. It examined one company DomainCar, cited by Microsoft was a prolific typosquatter and concluded that it, and several related companies, controlled some three million domain names, around four percent of the global total.

For only Disney-related .com domain names, Ipwalk found over 260 typo variations of the popular "disneychannel.com", owned by DomainCar, all of them leading to ad pages. "The actual number is bound to be much higher, since the examination used a limited set of typos," it noted. "Additionally, 957 domain names contained the word 'disney', and 338 domain names contained the test set of seven 'disney" typos."

Ipwalk provides statistics based daily analysis of more than 60 million domain names and 50 million IP addresses. This information is provided through the Ipwalk.com website and through customised trend reports.