Typosquatting

Typosquatting is a form of cybersquatting which relies on the chances that a person who enters a website address into a web browser will accidentally enter an incorrect website address and be led to an alternative address which the cybersquatter owns.

Alternatively, the company may obtain a number of websites with the misspellings and redirect them to the main, correctly spelt website. For example www.gooogle.com, www.goolge.com, www.gogle.com, and others, all redirect to www.google.com.

The domain of the Web site of the President of the United States, www.whitehouse.com, a pornographic Web site, and www.whitehouse.org, a satirical site.

A related gambit is obtaining "800" numbers that correspond to misspellings; a good illustration is AT&T's sudden abandonment of "1-800-OPERATOR" and replacing it with "1-800-CALL-ATT". It seems that many Americans don't know how to spell operator, enough that MCI was raking in a lot of business with "1-800-OPERATER", reaping the benefits of AT&T's advertising. (In both numbers, the final "R" is DNS, top-level domain, URL, cybersquatting, UDRP