Zuccarini "Typosquatting" - Search Strategies

Very interesting material, thank you!

I was stuck with one question. How do you sort out which typos are more likely to occur than others? Due to the makeup of our keyboards.

For example, these variants of 'hotmail' all involve at least two changed letters, but are still more likely to occur than the replacement of just any one letter in 'hotmail' by a 'd'.

jptmail
hjoptmail
otmal
hotmauk
hotmsol

Another matter is, whether there are any so-called squatters that register domains with typos occuring if you use a different keyboard layout. IIRC those in France and Germany differ slightly from the US ASCII keyboard.

The French starts, if my memory serves me right, with AZERTY, the German with QWERTZ.

So if you want to squat on typos made by a Frenchman typing amazon.com on a German keyboard, register qmqwon.com.

[ Reply to This | Parent ]

Re:qmqwon.com
by Seth_Finkelstein on Tuesday February 04 2003, @05:25AM (#11088)
User #3398 Info | http://sethf.com/

You're welcome. In reply to your question:

For the agrep (approximate) search strategy [sethf.com], the search is constrained to be over the domain names which actually exist. So, "hotmsol.com" will not be even be considered as an approximate match for "hotmail.com" unless someone has gone to the trouble of registering that domain.

For the Google search strategy [sethf.com] I believe the ranking is based in part on the number of occurrences and/or links - "hotmsol.com" is not a popular term, or rather, is much less popular than others.

[ Reply to This | Parent ]

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