Google goes up against spelling mistakes (and wins)

Google appealed to an arbitration forum that serves as an alternative to a court and won - a body called "The National Arbitration Forum" (The National Arbitration Forum), which serves as a legal alternative to courts, ruled in Google's favor after it was claimed that Sergey Gridsov, a resident of St. Petersburg, Russia, illegally established Laws of websites that take advantage of typing mistakes of surfers who want to reach the Google website. The web addresses of the sites are: googkle.com, ghoogle.com.

Google Goes Against Spelling Errors (And Wins)

A body called "The National Arbitration Forum", which serves as a legal alternative to the courts, ruled in favor of Google after it claimed that Sergey Gridsov, a resident of St. to the Google website. The websites' web addresses are googkle.com, ghoogle.com and gooigle.com.

Google was founded in September 1998 by two Stanford University graduates, and registered its domain name on the Internet about a year later. Gridsov, according to the claim, registered the names of his sites in December 2000 and January 2001.

The decision of the arbitrator, Paul Dorf, supports Google's claim that the incorrect addresses are part of a plan to infect surfers' computers with hostile software that may cause the operating system to crash, delete important information and files, or open access routes into systems containing sensitive and important information.

Google's claim was submitted on May 11, and until the day the decision was made, Gridsov had not responded to the accusations, which allows the arbitrator to accept any unproven accusation by Google as true.

The AP News Agency contacted Gridsov last Friday, using the email address he registered when he purchased the URLs. In the response, which was not signed by Gridsov himself, the writer confirmed the claim that the URLs were intended to take advantage of surfers' mistakes and thus gain great exposure more, but claimed in addition that there have never been any complaints about the functioning of the sites - and it is possible that new software that was installed on the sites, and which was supposed to be safe, is the cause of the complaints.

F-Secure, a Finnish company specializing in the detection and identification of hostile software, identified googkle.com as a problematic site in a message it published on April 26, more than two weeks before Google filed its complaint.

The attempt to "ride on the success" of popular websites is nothing new. One of the famous examples is the website whitehouse.com which published pornographic websites and products and was, of course, intended to take advantage of the mistakes of surfers who sought to reach the website Whitehouse.gov - the official website of the President of the USA.

Typosquatting
The common name for the attempt to enjoy typing mistakes of surfers trying to reach popular sites is "typosquatting". The exact definition, according to the website webopedia.com, is: "Purchasing a domain name that is a variation of a popular domain name in the expectation that the site will gain exposure as a result of typing mistakes by surfers."

Being a site rated as one of the safest on the entire Internet, and considering the huge number of surfers the site attracts (about 66 million different surfers per month), Google has been a favorite target for typosquatting for a long time.

Needless to say, the Internet community is quite clearly divided into two - the owners of the websites that engage in typosquatting and see it as a legitimate business, and the owners of the original popular websites that oppose the phenomenon with all their might. The website www.tipz.net summarizes an article on the subject with the words: "Those who engage in typosquatting are scavengers who feed on the crumbs that fall from the mouths of other animals. It may not be illegal, but it is certainly unacceptable."