Deceptive Advertising

According to an article published September 2007 on the madsdam website¹, this paid parking service now has more than 1 million domains utilizing the service. We verified this number, coming up with approximately 1,160,000 results.

In addition to being the parking service of choice for a surprisingly large number of domains, the "Find Something Interesting" parking service has another small surprise: it seems to use some extremely sneaky techniques. According to a comment on the website siteadvisor.com² , domains using this service initially show links by Google, but when a user clicks the link, the user does not go to the corresponding page. Instead, the user ends up seeing links of a different ad program, which are meant to be similar to the subject of the link that the user initially clicked on, and for which the owner of the domain will receive a commission.

Let's look at an example in action:

A user wants to buy security software for her computer and erroneously types in "snynantec.com". Instead of the Symantec site, the user is now staring at a "Find Something Interesting" page. Notice that the ads on the links on the page show the correct spelling of "Symantec". These ads appear to be generated by Google's parking service, which is possible done because Google appears to have very sophisticated technology for matching typo domains with the corresponding websites. Therefore, this parking service appears to use Google's technology to figure out which trademark the user is searching for, and then displays its own advertisments based on the link the user clicks on. Continuing with our example, lets' say the user clicks on the link "Norton Internet Security".

Now the user sees a diffent page with a new list of links (these links are now real PPC ads that will generate money for the parking service).

Perhaps a little confused, she chooses "Norton Internet Security" once again. This time she arrives at the Symantec online store.

The variable in the link above seems to indicate that the user found the site via paid advertising. In other words, Symantec most likely just paid money for advertising on a customer that fully intended to come to its site anyway. But that isn't all: the parking service may not always have ads for the website the person intended to go to, in which case the website may display competitor ads only. In any case, one factor remains the same - the owner of the site and the parking service are both making money by infringing on a 3rd party trademark.

The Investigation Begins

From prior experience, it is already known that typo domains used by this service are not all owned by the same person/entity. The goal of this investigation is to find out, and give proper credit to, the company which runs the "Find Something Interesting" parking service. And if we are able to prove that the company running the parking service also owns a few typo domains on the side (and that these typo domains are using the above-mentioned parking service) well, that would just make things more interesting.