At Slate, Paul Boutin offers an interesting set of suggestions on how to fix URL typo scams.
Various studies have estimated that 10 percent to 20 percent of all hand-entered URLs are mistyped, adding up to at least 20 million wrong numbers per day. From my own experience that sounds about right—I can spell just fine but I leave out characters, transpose them, or hit the wrong key at least 10 times a day. No wonder wave after wave of entrepreneurs have fought to tap that flow and turn it into cash.
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So, are we just doomed to suffer one typo traffic scam after another? Only until someone makes a software program that lets me control what to do with my typos. Here’s a simple design spec. First, intercept obvious, punctuation-challenged goofs like wwwslate.com. Second, recognize when a URL isn’t resolved by domain-name servers by detecting when Internet Explorer, Paxfire, or any other known culprit tries to serve a landing page. Third, keep a database of typo-trap URLs like htobot.com. And lastly, I should be able to manually configure the software to handle my habitual mistakes—whenever I type markrobinson.com, give me markrobinson.org instead.
Interesting idea. Actually, I’m surprised there isn’t a Firefox extension for this already!
Ed Bott 