Typos mean big revenue for search giant Google

A small part of Google's $23 billion in revenue comes from typos, Harvard researchers have found.

Tyler Moore, a postdoctoral research fellow at the Center for Research on Computation and Society (CRCS) at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS), and Benjamin Edelman, an assistant professor at the Harvard Business School in the Negotiation, Organizations & Markets unit, at Harvard Business School, studied the most popular .com sites, finding that each had about 280 registered typo domains associated with it, a "typo domain" being a domain that could feasibly be created from attempting to type the actual domain name (blogpot.com is one of our favorite examples).

The researchers looked at the advertising practices on these sites, and extrapolated from average advertising revenue for Google pay-per-click (PPC) ads to estimate the amount of revenue that Google gets from ads on these "typosquatting" sites.

Read the complete article in Bostonist.com