Typos for $500 million per year.

It is very simple: the so-called tayposkvottery register domains with "typos" in order to collect random traffic, and deliver the targeted ads, usually Google AdWords. The Conference Financial Cryptography and Data Security experts from Harvard announced its study (PDF), which attempted to assess the volume of the market. The authors also make the assumption that Google is providing technical assistance More Search and shares with them a profit.

According to their estimates, the network contains at least 938 000 domain names that are incorrect spellings 3264 the largest sites zone. Com (take into account, at least five-letter). At every popular site has, on average, 281 domain misspellings. "Erroneous" is about 1,16% of the Internet zone. Com.

Few of the research methodology. Typos were generated by model-Dahmer Lowenstein, ie replacing each letter, no letters, an extra letter or letters change places is that the new word is from the original at a distance of 1 step. To study generated a list of domains in two steps from the originals. Plus were added to typical network typographical errors (for example, the letters www in the beginning of the name of each site, etc.). For 3264 the largest site received 1 910 738 candidates. Then a random sample was drawn from 2,195 sites, which the researchers examined manually to determine the percentage of certainty. The audit score of tayposkvotterskih domain was reduced to 937 918.

The study was launched crawler, which cost 284 914 domains from the list, as alleged tayposkvotterskie. It was found that 80% of available sites available contextual advertising, and the remaining 20% is redirect.

A large percentage of the lock due to the fact that on some servers hosted tens of thousands of tayposkvotterskih domains, so that the crawler access was blocked by the regular protection from DDoS-attacks. The vast majority of them then open normally with other IP-addresses. As for the "unclassified" domains, it is, basically, sites using Javascript, which crawler can not normally handle.

What is contextual advertising is placed on the domains tayposkvotterov? At 36% of contextual advertising is the original site with the correct spelling. The bulk of the rest - a reference to its competitors.

Were also identified in 1250 identifiers affiliate program Google, who place advertisements on these domains. Identifiers can be seen in the URL after the parameter "client =". So, it turned out that some of these identifiers are more frequent than usual.

Five major Google partners cover 63% of the market, and top-10 cover 76% of the market.

Among the most popular affiliate programs are Commission Junction (905 domains of the sample), LinkShare (652) and Performics (Google Affliate Network, 290).

With regard to redirect, it identified 75 of legitimate Web sites that collect traffic from tayposkvotterskih domains. For example, service hosting image Pict.com gets traffic from 128 domains, which mistakenly write the name competitors. Or the famous casino Bet365.com collects traffic from domains where name is written wrongly competitor Sportsbook (saportsbook.com, sxportsbook.com and another 326 options).

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