Many people hate typos and find them annoying. I can be one of those people. Seriously, it only takes one second to hit the backspace key and fix the typo. With Google, however, typos can mean big business as Benjamin Edelman and Tyler Moore have estimated that typos make the search engine giant $497 million per year.
Edelman and Moore both wrote a paper titled, “Measuring Typosquatting Perpetrators and Funders.” In a blog post summarizing it, they stated a few sets of data and wrote, “According to our analysis, 57% of typo sites include Google pay-per-click ads.”
Then they took a comment about the effect of Google’s connection: “Combining our observations with financial reports and others’ estimates, we conclude that Google’s revenue from typosquatting on the top 100,000 sites is $497 million per year.”
Google’s is most likely the only search engine they point a finger at, since not nearly as many ads from Yahoo and Microsoft appear on typosquatting sites.