LOOK CLOSER: Web users who type in "faceboook.com" are greeted with a Facebook-like website that tries to scam them. - Relaxnews 2011
SAN FRANCISCO: "Facebook.com" is by far the most common URL that people type into the address bar of their web browser.
People are typing "facebook.com" almost three times more often than "google.com."
The URL statistics were published on July 25 by Christopher Finke, a software engineer and the creator of URL Fixer, a browser add-on that fixes human errors that are typed in the address bar on your browser.
Facebook.com is the most popular domain and accounts for 9% of all typed domains. Google.com is the second most typed address and accounts for 3.3% of all typed domains.
Youtube.com, gmail.com, twitter.com, mail.google.com, yahoo.com, hotmail.com, amazon.com and reddit.com also feature in the Top 10 most typed domains, said Finke.
According to website traffic monitoring company Alexa, the Top 10 sites on the Web by the amount of traffic they receive are, in order: Google, Facebook, Youtube, Yahoo!, Live, Baidu, Wikipedia, Blogger, MSN and Tencent.
Finke noted in the comments on his blog that while "All of Facebook's properties (*.facebook.com) combine [to make up] 9.4% [of all typed domains]; all of Google's (*.google.com, YouTube, Blogspot, etc.) combine for at least 9.7%."
"The only locales where neither Google nor Facebook control the most popular domain are ru-RU (Russia - vkontakte.ru), fi-FI (Finland - aapeli.com, a gaming website), ko-KR (South Korea - fomos.kr, an e-sports website), and zh-CN (China - baidu.com)," Finke said.
Not surprisingly, people often make mistakes when entering addresses into their URL bar and end up with all kinds of typos. Frequent variations on the top level domain ".com" include .com\, .ocm, .con, .cmo, .copm, .xom, ".com,", .vom, .comn, .com', ".co,", .comj, .coim, .cpm, .colm, .conm, and .coom.
"The website that appears to benefit the most from users mistyping a legitimate URL is faceboook.com (count the o's)," said Finke.
Scammers have taken advantage of the common typing error (which is typed once for every 7,930 times that facebook.com is correctly typed), setting up a website that makes visitors think they have been chosen as a "Facebook Winner." - Relaxnews 2011
Source: TechCentral
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