New Scientist bad math
By Techgirl

While some highly paid male scientists seem to understand maths, they seem to struggle with logic.

In Nov, 2009, I had reported on how a porn site was faking popular Indian blog India Uncut.  Is you accidentally mistyped one alphabet in Indiauncut.com, you found yourself in a hard core porn site.  A number of con artists buy website names similar to the high trafficked sites so they can get eye balls who will click on their ads.  Or set up malware on the computer so it becomes part of a spam botnet.

But many people quickly backtrack if they are taken to a different website.  Most certainly do not click on advertisements in websites they did not want to be in the first place.

Now one of the most respected science blogs in the world New Scientist has worked out that Google may be earning as much as $500 Million from such spelling mistakes while trying to logon to a website

“
Moore and Edelman started by using common spelling mistakes to create a list of possible typo domains for the 3264 most popular .com websites, as determined by Alexa.com rankings. They estimate that each of the 3264 top sites is targeted by around 280 typo domains.

They then used software to crawl 285,000 of these 900,000-odd sites to determine what revenue the typo domains might be generating.

If the top 100,000 websites suffer the same typosquatting rate as the sites Moore and Edelman studied, up to 68 million people a day could visit a typo site, they say. They estimate that almost 60 per cent of typo sites could have adverts supplied by Google.

If the company earns as much per visitor from ads on typo sites as it reportedly does from ads alongside search results, it could potentially earn $497 million a year in revenue from typo domains, they conclude.
“

As you can see this New Scientist article is working on the hypothesis that each of the top sites has 280 typo domains.  Could Wikipedia and Facebook have 280 typo domains that would lead to the fake sites?  Try typing in Wiikipeedia or Faceeebook into Google and you will be taken to the real sites.

The article also works on the assumption that Google ‘earns as much per visitor from ads on typo sites as it reportedly does from ads alongside search results’. This seems far fetched as well. 

Do readers who make a spelling mistake and are taken to a different website stay there long enough to click on the same number of advertisements as the real domain.  Does anyone really believe that if I am looking for India’s No. 1 news site Times of India and I am taken to a different website that I will actually hang around there?  Or a girl in Mumbai wants to read Amit Varma’s excellent blog, then she will hang around clicking ads on a porn site?

While there is some money to be made from look alike sites and advertisements run on misspelt websites, Google earning $500 million does not add up.

Google earns most of its revenue from advertising and will do all that is practical to ensure its advertisements are shown on legit websites. 

New Scientist, your logic seems a bit unscientific.

(Techgoss had published the following on Nov 4, 2009)

Porn fakes popular blog
By Techgirl

‘India Uncut’ is one of my favourite blogs.  So much so that I start my day reading it.  Techoss itself is lower on the list of sites to be read (Sorry Ed, but you told me to ‘write it as I see it’ in my snippets).

India Uncut boss and chief blogger Amit Varma is one of the most respected names in the vast Indian blogging world.  He is a heavy weight having been Managing Editor of Cricinfo and written for such mainstream media like Wall Street Journal, Guardian and Mint.  His blog is clever, insightful and hugely popular. In April, BusinessWeek listed Amit along Sonia, Manmohan, Tatas, Ambanis and the like as among the ’50 most powerful people in India’. In May, his book ‘My Friend Sancho’ was launched to critical acclaim and has soon become a best seller.  This week, he has been invited as a TED fellow to the prestigious conference being held at the Infosys campus.

What happens to such a gifted wordsmith after the Businessweek recognition in April and a successful book in May, 2009? Well the porn industry wants to ride the waves of your success starting May.

If you are looking for Amit’s blog Indiauncut.com and accidentally mistype Inidauncut.com, you will find yourself at a hard core porn site.  Investigations at the domain registry shows that inidauncut was registered by US-based Land Merchandising Corp in May, 2009

Do NOT type in this URL to have a peek at this porn site. It may install malware on your computer.

The porn industry has been using this scam for many years. Because Inidauncut is based in USA, it will be a costly and labour intensive exercise to shut it down.  But it can be done.

In the past, every morning I used to tremble with excitement while quickly logging on to Amit’s site to read his magical blog posts. Now, I take my time as accidentally pressing the wrong keys could take me to the porn site.
 

(Thanks for the tip Ramesh)

Techgoss note:  Techgirl is a senior Tech journalist who reports on the IT, KPO and KPO Sectors for a leading media house.  In her spare time, she dabbles in satire in her blog
http://techgirltalk.blogspot.com