Typos may earn Google £320m a year
Deceptive websites using Google's advertising networks may earn the search giant millions
"Typosquatting", where companies and individuals register a misspelled variant of a popular web domain, may be earning Google as much as $500 million (£320 million) annually, New Scientist reports.
For example, a typosquatter might register "sidewasynews.com" in the hope of getting visits from people who meant to type "sidewaysnews.com".
If that mistake is made often enough, the owner of sidewasynews.com can profit by placing ads on their page, perhaps by using Google AdWords or AdSense, which automatically assign ads to a page based on its content.
Now Tyler Moore and Benjamin Edelman at Harvard University have estimated just how much money this could bring in for Google
After analysing misspellings of the 3,264 most popular .com websites, the pair estimated that each was targeted by around 280 typo domains.
They then used software to crawl 285,000 of these 900,000-odd sites to determine what revenue the typo domains might be generating, estimating that almost 60% could have adverts supplied by Google.
If the search engine giant earns as much per visitor from ads on typo sites as it reportedly does from ads alongside search results, it could potentially earn $497 million a year in revenue from typo domains, Mr Moore and Mr Edelman conclude.
Google's total 2009 revenues were $23 billion, 97% of which came from advertising.
A Google spokesperson pointed out that the company will remove ads from typo domains if the owner of a site with a trademarked name makes a complaint.
