A civil suit filed in Florida by Dell and its Alienware subsidiary is giving insight into the enormous sums of money that can be made by creating Web pages full of advertising links. In October, Dell sued a group of domain registrars, alleging the companies bought more than 1,100 domain names with trademark-infringing characteristics, such as "dellbatterrogram.com" in order to put advertising links on the pages.

The practice, known as typosquatting, is illegal. It's intended to draw unwitting Web surfers to pages with URLs (uniform resource locators) that are similar to legitimate sites, and then redirect them to other sites. The owners of these Web sites get revenue from advertising referral programs every time a link is clicked.

View: The full story @ PCWorld


There are 7 additional comments
Advertisement
(2 replies) Quote this comment Reply to this comment #1 Posted by Dakkaroth on 05 Feb 2008 - 17:56
How many people put dellbatterrogram instead of dell.com?
Quote this comment #1.1 Posted by Cøbra on 05 Feb 2008 - 18:49
Ever heard of Google? For instance, Google highlights keywords in domain names as well.

These typo-squatting companies rely heavily on search engines for traffic. Not necessarily direct typo traffic.
Quote this comment #1.2 Posted by djuro37 on 06 Feb 2008 - 12:37
dellbatteryprogram.com --- for dell battery replacements, from the recall, they sent people to that site
Quote this comment Reply to this comment #2 Posted by SecretAgentMan on 05 Feb 2008 - 18:03
Yeah, just how is it possible to dellbatterrogr... uuuuuuum do that anyway.
Quote this comment Reply to this comment #3 Posted by vetneufuse on 05 Feb 2008 - 18:10
I thought this was widely known already that it happens? but I really wish it'd stop... i dont know how many times i type dslreports.com wrong or ebay and get a ad site.... like ebya.com....
(1 reply) Quote this comment Reply to this comment #4 Posted by necrosis on 05 Feb 2008 - 18:38
I wonder if whitehouse.com can fall under this.
Quote this comment #4.1 Posted by vetneufuse on 05 Feb 2008 - 19:54
(necrosis said @ #4)
I wonder if whitehouse.com can fall under this.


no it cant, the white house does not profit as a corporation / company.. the white house is a part of the government... there has been case law before about this because of that reason it's never been taken down... heck I could start a site CIA.COM or FBI.COM or NSA.COM and have the same ruleing... but something like USPS.GOV which is the post office is also a for profit business in a sense so they got USPS.COM for themselves from someone who squatted on it
[1]

Commenting has either been disabled on this article or you are not logged in. Click here to login or register, its free!

Note: Anonymous commenting is disabled in order to keep the quality of responses to a high standard.


Scroll to the Top
....
My Preferences
....
Communicating with server
Loading
Please Wait...
....
Loading
 X 
....