Is Google doing evil by profiting from typos?

Posted May 1st 2006 9:08AM by Sarah Gilbert
Filed under: Products and Services, Newspapers, Google (GOOG)

As long as I've been surfing eBay, I've been in on the dirty little not-so-secret that many of you share: typos are the way to go if you want to save money. There's even a search engine devoted to it.

I'm not the only former spelling bee champ exploiting the less fortoonat. Google makes money on typos too, by selling ads that appear on sites like nyrimes.com, ebbay.com, and OPB.com. Google insists that it's in the clear legally - after all, no one is confused, thinking that "OPB.com" really is Oregon Public Broadcasting's non-profit news site when it he arrives at the ad-filled site.

Sure. We know. None of us are total, complete dolts, no matter how poor our spelling or slippery our keyboard. But what we do know is that this seems a bit underhanded. And profiting from that? Harvard researcher Ben Edelman says that seems to fly in the face of their motto: "Do no evil," in this Washington Post article [registration required].

More evidence that Google's the next evil empire. Stay tuned...

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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

5-01-2006 @ 12:07PM

Techie said...

I agree that it's wrong to profit from spelling mistakes. But it's extremely hard to police against this type of wrong doing. You can't prevent people from getting domain names like www.ebbay.com. Google has done the smart thing so when you type "www.goolge.com", it redirects you to the correct Google page.

As for ads on these questionable sites, it would be extremely hard for Google to justify not selling ads to them. They are not porn sites. There very well could be a backlash against Google if it stopped selling ads to these sites. With the general Western public already unhappy about Google bowing down to China's censorship for Google China, this would be a silly move on their part.

5-01-2006 @ 1:53PM

Steven Maroulis said...

Actually, Google hasn't done anything more than being vigilant of Google TM typo domain owners whom they served with C&Ds and got the typo domains back. Now they simply forward those to google.com. Myspace.com is also notorious for serving C&Ds to domain-typo owners.

I agree in principle it's "unethical" in a way, but these are typo domains that contain a lot of traffic (usually by type-ins rather than links from other sites) so all ads served by Google or Overture or even MSN are actually related to the site.