Google wins 'typo-squatting' battle

Google has won a ruling giving it control of URLs that contain misspellings of its name.

The National Arbitration Forum has ruled that the search engine has the rights to the URLs googkle.com, ghoogle.com, gfoogle.com and gooigle.com.

The pages had been registered by a third party, Sergey Gridasov, and it was alleged that visitors to them were in danger of downloading viruses, Trojan horses and spyware.

"[The] Complainant contends that the Respondent does not have rights or legitimate interests in the domain names, which are confusingly similar to Complainant's Google mark," the arbitration found.

"[The] Complainant's assertion in this instance is sufficient to establish a prima facie case in support of its allegations and shift the burden to Respondent to provide evidence to rebut Complainant's contentions. However, Respondent has failed to respond and has, therefore, failed to meet its burden. "

Since the company holding the URLs did not contest the ruling Google now gains control of them.

Using misspelt URLs to attract page hits, known as typo-squatting, has been a tactic long used by unscrupulous website managers as a way of boosting page hits.

"Typo-squatting is the intentional misspelling of words with intent to intercept and siphon off traffic from its intended destination by preying on 'internauts' who make common typing errors," said the World Intellectual Property Organization commenting on a similar case in 2003.

"Typosquatting is inherently parasitic and of itself evidence of bad faith."