Hacker News Reader

Comment by 55555 | Hacker News Reader

How much do you think you'd make typo-squatting every .com and .net with parked domain ads? A billion dollars a year?

> In the weeks following the change, the site came into the top 20 most popular sites, and reached the top 10 in the aftermath of the change and surrounding controversy.

1 Billion dollars a year is a good estimate.

High margin so a $20B market cap?

With growth like that 20b would be a bargain.

Assuming you mean they get all URL typos for free, probably a lot less than days past. How many people can only ever Google things? Directly typing in a URL has to be a tiny minority of users.

Even less than you think, because even when they type in the URL it’s into a search bar which is smart enough to correct the typos.

Edit: What’s really going to bake your noodle though, is that given all the issues with various kinds of URL squatting, they’re actually safer than those of us typing in the URL directly. Let’s hear it for my Dad, cybersecurity thought leader.

> they’re actually safer than those of us typing in the URL directly

I heard there's something called a "bookmark" which makes it so you don't have to type in the URL though.

But that's arcane magic.

Never got into bookmarks, seemed slower to have to grab a mouse and dig around to find the bookmark I was looking for, vs ctrl-t then the first few letters.

Except that bookmarks are searchable, and in most browsers that search is a) available by hotkey, and b) offered as suggestions in the autosuggest of the address bar, so bookmarks tend to be useful to me at least.

Firefox will search for bookmarks from the address bar in exactly the way you describe.

It can be configured to only search the bookmarks, not leaking the sites you visit to the search engine.

The omnibar (do they still call it that?) searches your bookmarks and it's more reliable than hoping it doesn't age out of your history.

Fun fact: Firefox adds your whole window (url/search bar and pinned bookmarks) to your tab-stop queue. So you can just press tab to select the pinned bookmarks and use arrow keys to navigate the bookmarks.

That is, unless, the site you're on is Technically Fucking Braindead and decides to intercept keystrokes. Fuck those sites though. There's an about:config to disable that behavior but a some certain sites stop working entirely without it. Google Documents... I'm looking at you...

Here's a recent example of typosquatting ads serving malware from the first Google search result:

https://threatresearch.ext.hp.com/adverts-mimicking-popular-...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com