URL Tracer from Microsoft prevents typo-squatting

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URL Tracer from Microsoft prevents typo-squatting

by Victor Agreda, Jr. Apr 7th 2006

Ever type in a URL incorrectly and wind up on some crazy pop-up ridden landscape of porn and sundries? Those "search" sites are bad enough, but try going to neoppets.com and see what Santa has for you... Microsoft has been tracking "typo-squatters" through its Strider Typo-Patrol Project. And they now have a tool so that you can track the worst offenders. The tool looks at a number of common typos: misspellings, missing dots and so forth. These common errors wind up making big bucks for the offenders, as they have an elaborate scheme of grabbing clicks, which can result in AdSense money (or other clickthrough payments). Hey, they're not scamming you for fun... Microsoft is being a good corporate citizen by throwing some of its research money at this problem, and the Strider tool is one of the first tools of its kind I've seen come out of the lab. Between this and the already-good anti-phishing tools from MS, Vista could really be chock full of consumer protection devices...

[Via eWeek]

Tags: adsense, clickthrough, domain parking, DomainParking, research, squatter, strider, typo

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

Razib Ahmed said 7:49PM on 4-08-2006

With the complex nature of Internet, this kind of secutiry system is much needed. Microsoft has done something really good for all the users. I hope that other leading companies such Google will come forward too.

Zelidar said 3:37AM on 4-09-2006

Wow, what an interesting article! Thanks Victor.

I've been watching at the growing number of typosquatters over the past year and I am very pleased to read that actions have been taken against them.

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