Microsoft’s new battle against typo-squatters could cause financial difficulties for companies serving ad pages.

Microsoft Research recently added a “Typo-Patrol” feature to their 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.

Catching traffic from mistyped domain names has become big business, especially if you own domain names containing typos of popular generic words or brand names. This practice is known as typo-squatting. 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.

As an example of how common the typo-squatting phenomenon is, Ipwalk examined the domain names held by DomainCar, a company pointed out by Microsoft as a prolific typo-squatter.

Just looking at Disney-related domain names, Ipwalk found over 260 typo variations of the popular “disneychannel.com”, 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. Additionally, 957 domain names contained the word “disney”, and 338 domain names contained the test set of 7 “disney” typos. These numbers are from April 18 for the .com TLD.

DomainCar seems to be the same company as, or tightly connected to, Unasi and several other companies. They have a huge domain name portfolio hovering around 3 million. That is 4% of the world’s domain names (gTLD names).

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.

For more information, please contact;
Peter Alguacil, Ipwalk AB, +46-21-124248, peter@ipwalk.com

Ipwalk is a global information company providing statistics based on a continuously updated database. Ipwalk is processing and analyzing more than 60 million domain names and 50 million IP addresses on a daily basis. This information is provided through the Ipwalk.com website and through customized trend reports.