Domain Name Confusion

Those not familiar with TLDs (top level domain names) like .gov, .com, and .edu may inadvertently go to www.whitehouse.com when looking for the home page of the White House located in Washington D.C. whitehouse.com is a page with pictures of the president that some may find a little disturbing (for those who do not link up to it, it is a pornography site that includes some tweaked pictures of President Clinton). The actual official whitehouse page can be found at www.whitehouse.gov.

With so many web pages in cyberspace, confusing domain names can make looking for a page frustrating at times. Misspellings of popular names frequently bring users to a page completely unrelated to their intended destination. People capitalize on users making typing errors or spelling errors when surfing on the web by registering domain names that are extremely close to other more popular ones. These names do not infringe on any trademark, so the practice is perfectly legal.

Some good examples of Internet confusion are derived from the names of popular search engines. There are a vast amount of sites that sound like www.yahoo.com (the search engine) but that point to a pornography site, such as www.yahoooo.com, www.yahooooo.com and www.yahhoo.com. Also www.excit.com, www.altavist.com www.altavist.com, www.hotbott.com, and www.lycoss.com all go to pornography sites instead of perhaps their repective search engines: www.excite.com, www.altavista.digital.com, www.hotbot.com, and www.lycos.com. There are also sites like www.yahooo.com which say explicitly that the surfer is not where he or she expected to be and have a link to the page that was likely intended.

Alta Vista's site itself is also an interesting way in which domain names can be confusing. If asked to do a search on Alta Vista, many people probably go to www.altavista.com instead of the correct page, www.altavista.digital.com. However, you can use Digital's search in both locations!