Google may be earning $497 million a year from websites that mimic the misspelled domain names of existing sites, says ZDNet.
A study done by Harvard's Tyler Moore and Benjamin Edelman states that Google's network of display ads run on sites practicing the act of "typosquatting." This tactic is especially fruitful for sites that have popular counterparts. The research reports that the collection of sites pretending to be Yahoo (i.e. Yahooo or Yahhoo) has more than 200,000 visitors a day.
Overall, typo domains collectively receive more than 68 million visitors a day, according to the study.
Moore and Edelman estimate that 60 percent of these sites feature ads supplied by Google. As per company policy, Google says it will remove ads from misspelled sites if a complaint is filed by the original site.
