by Alan Greenblatt

Your bad typing is making Google money. Two Harvard researchers estimate the search giant is collecting nearly a half-billion dollars a year from advertising placed on Web sites with "misspelled" URLs.

A decade ago, cybersquatters who registered domain names resembling those of famous companies and institutions drew a lot of attention for getting people to unwittingly visit porn sites. Today, a spelling error in your address bar is much more likely to take you to a Web page filled with advertising instead of porn.

"Ads pay more consistently than porn, especially if the typosquatter is targeting a famous brand," says David Steele, an intellectual property lawyer in California.

It all adds up.

"If these typo domains were treated as a single Web site, that site would be ranked by Alexa as the 10th most popular Web site in the world," write Tyler Moore and Benjamin Edelman, a research fellow and assistant business professor, respectively, at Harvard University.

 

Companies offering cell phone service, shoes or just about anything else on the Web can easily lose customers because people who mistakenly type the wrong address for one company can end up clicking on ads that lead them straight to a competitors' sites.

"Google contractors will have contracts with hundreds if not thousands of cybersquatters," Steele says.

Companies faced with this situation can end up deciding that they have to place ads on squatter sites with URLs similar to their own just to get their own customers to come to their sites, as originally intended.

"It's taking advantage of an attention mistake that might lead to a payoff," says Lee Rainie, director of the Pew Internet & American Life Project. "In digital terms, you just need a fraction of the people to click on the ads."

Moore and Edelman used software to look at more than 900,000 typosquatting sites that targeted the top 3,264 Web sites. Extrapolating ad placements and rates from that sample, they estimate that Google is collecting $497 million annually from ads on squatter sites that target the top 100,000 Web sites. (Read the full report in PDF format.)

Google states that its policy is to remove ads from such sites if a trademark holder complains but hasn't commented more broadly on the study. When asked about the study, a Google spokesperson supplied this statement:

We take trademark violations very seriously. When we are made aware of trademarked terms on sites within the AdSense for Domains program we take prompt action including disallowing ad serving.

In addition to being an author of this study, Edelman is also counsel for a lawsuit challenging Google for allowing ads to be placed on typosquatting sites. He says the case didn't affect his research.

Edelman also admits his guesstimates about the size of Google's haul could be wrong.

"If Google tells you the number is something else, I would be inclined to trust Google's numbers," Edelman says. "On the other hand, Google hasn't rushed to release the information."