What are the odds you'll land on a typo-squatting site?

Typos and URLs make a terrible combination, according to a report released Monday by security company McAfee.

Web surfers have a 1-in-14 chance of landing on a typo-squatting site, due to mistyping the URL of a popular site, according to the report called "What's In A Name: The State of Typo-Squatting 2007."

Landing on such a site, in turn, can ultimately lead receiving more spam, once one's e-mail is harvested from the typo-squatting site. In a majority of the cases, however, typo squatters are looking to generate money via pay-per-click ads on their domains, according to the report.

McAfee, which examined 1.9 million variations of 2,771 popular domain names, found that game sites had the greatest likelihood of being squatted at 14 percent, followed by airline sites at 11.4 percent, and mainstream media sites at 10.8 percent. Dating sites, at 10.2 percent, and technology-Web 2.0 sites, at 9.6 percent, were fourth and fifth. Children's site are also highly targeted by typo squatters.

It may be time to rein in those dancing digits.

[nitpicky]

grammar checking tool

anyone else find writing with grammar/spelling mistakes credible?

[Stating]

Raise The Domain Registration Fee

This is what happens when you can register a domain for only $3. If the fee were or $100 or more then it would reduce the number of cyber squatters.

[`WarpKat]

I would take that one step further

Regulate the registrars so that they are REQUIRED to check (BY HUMAN BEING) the domain being registered and then determine if it's meant to be a squat site. This would justify raising the fee to at LEAST $75 per domain per year and decrease the fee after the first two years to $10 a year.

Unfortunately, WIPO makes it difficult to do just that since they have an 'arbitration process' that one has to go through to get something like this taken care of - BUT it costs an arm, leg and a soul just to get it started - not very consumer friendly.

[editor23--2008]

sad trend

It was sad that typosquatting is seen even for kiddy sites like http://www.americangirl.com and http://www.indianchild.com/.