Internet July 25th, 2007 by HMTKSteve
How many paths lead to Google?
I was doing some Internet browsing today and, on my way to Google, I mispelled the url. Instead of typing in google.com I typed in foofle.com. Imagine my surprise when I found myself at Google! This got me to thinking, how many other "typo" domains has Google purchased?
- Google typos that still take you to Google
- foofle.com
- gogle.com
- gooogle.com
- gooooogle.com
I focused entirely on common misspellings of the google domain name. I have no idea how many domain names Google may actually own and point back to itself.
- All of these go back to Google
- g00gle.com
- ggoogle.com
- gogole.com
- googel.com
- googil.com
- googli.com
- googlie.com
- googlr.com
- goolge.com
- gooogle.com
There are probably many more but these are the ones I was able to find by typing in URLs.
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- Digg advertising
That’s pretty awesome that they can just gobble up nearly any domain even remotely related to theirs. I suppose that’s what you can do when you have billions and billions of dollers. FYI Google is in fact a domain name registrar (but one which does not actually sell domain names) so they can freely register any domain name that they want because they are just signing themselves up.
That is quite the racket! So, all they have to pay is the ICANN fee?
It is not surprising that they want to protect their core search business and prevent any traffic from slipping away to misspelled sites but i was not aware that they are also a domain name registrar.
Seems like they have got their hands in almost any business these days.