<![CDATA[Gawker: valleywag, typosquatting]]> http://tags.gawker.com/assets/base/img/thumbs140x140/gawker.com.png <![CDATA[Gawker: valleywag, typosquatting]]> http://gawker.com/tag/valleywag/typosquatting http://gawker.com/tag/valleywag/typosquatting <![CDATA[Your typos keep 200 Googlers employed]]> Harvard professor and professional Internet gadfly Ben Edelman has released a study that says Google may be making $32 million to $50 million a year from "typosquatting," a practice in which cunning linguists register mistyped domain names in the hope that slips of your fingers will translates into pageviews and ad clicks. Why, that's enough to save the jobs of some 200 overpaid engineers from Google's otherwise-certain layoffs!

Google has an advertising service, AdSense for Domains, specifically designed for these domain-name profiteers. But the company's flacks deny that such sites make money for the search engine. Maybe they should give it a try on the 9,984 domain names they do own?

]]> http://gawker.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=5067225&view=rss&microfeed=true <![CDATA[The domainers' worst enemy]]> Trust the Gray Lady to suck the drama — and the sense — out of a tech story. The New York Times profiles David Ulevitch of OpenDNS, an entrepreneur who's trying to make the Internet's domain-name system work better and faster. That means, of course, killing off the practice of "typo-squatting." Since the Times couldn't manage a decent explanation of this conflict, we'll oblige.Typo-squatting is a particulary unsavory side of the domain-name business. Clumsy Web users mistype website addresses all the time. Domainers, those wily entrepreneurs who register domain names in the hopes of making a profit, register common misspellings like "google.cm," and throw ads up on those websites, making a cheap and fast buck. (Business 2.0 recently profiled Kevin Ham, a domainer who's built a $300 million business on typo-squatting and other domain-name maneuvers.)

Ulevitch's OpenDNS would make typo-squatters an endangered species. By redirecting mistyped Web addresses to the correct site, Ulevitch makes life easier for Web surfers — and impossible for domainers. But then how does OpenDNS make money? Through advertisements displayed when an OpenDNS user accidentally types a search-engine query into his browser's address bar. Sounds like Ulevitch, just like his enemies, aims to profit from your mistakes. (Photo by Jim Wilson/The New York Times)]]> http://gawker.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=276297&view=rss&microfeed=true