Most people may use a search engine to go to their website of choice, but there are still some internet users who go to at least some of their websites by typing in the domain name, and the most popular type-in is Facebook.com followed by Google.com. And if you want to typosquat a domain name, the best domain name to have is Faceboook.com. These are the findings from six months of data collected and analysed by Chris Finke from his Firefox browser add-on URL Fixer. URL Fixer corrects typos in URLs that you enter in the address bar. For example, if you type google.con, it will correct it to google.com (asking first, if you enable confirmation). Finke analysed more than 7.5 million URL bar entries and he found that facebook.com is by far the most typed in domain name, three times more popular than the second most popular typed in domain – google.com, although google.com is still the most popular website. The reason for this is many people get to Google via the search or address bar in their browser rather than going to the Google website. Likewise, Yahoo is the seventh most popular address but is a top five domain. The top ten type-in domain names are facebook.com (with 9% of all type-ins) followed by google.com (3.3%), youtube.com (3.3%), gmail.com (1.1%), twitter.com (1.1%), mail.google.com (0.6%), yahoo.com (0.6%), hotmail.com (0.6%), amazon.com (0.5%) and reddit.com (0.5%). The most commonly mistyped domain names after faceboook.com are googe.com and goole.com. However as a proportion of typed-in domain names, very few end up at scam websites with only one type-in ending up at a scam site once for every 7,390 times the correct Facebook address is typed in. And .COM domains make up 63 per cent of all typed in top level domains followed by .ORG (4%), .NET (4%)and .DE (4%), reflecting both on some of the more popular TLDs and where Finke’s add-on is popular. Rounding out the top nine are .RU (2%) then .HU, .FR, co.uk and .BR (all 1%). The top 17 TLD typos are all variations of .com. In order of frequency, they are .com, .ocm, .con, .cmo, .copm, .xom, “.com,”, .vom, .comn, .com’, “.co,”, .comj, .coim, .cpm, .colm, .conm, and .coom. The most popular non-.com/.net/.org domains: google.de, vkontakte.ru (a Russian social network), and google.fr. Facebook and Google dominated worldwide according to Finke’s analysis with 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 (Korea – fomos.kr, an e-sports website), and zh-CN (China – baidu.com). And finally in his analysis Finke notes that none of the domains with more than a 0.0005 per cent share are unregistered, indicating that this kind of usage data would not be very useful to a scammer or phisher looking for new domain names. The full analysis by Chris Finke is available at www.chrisfinke.com/2011/07/25/what-do-people-type-in-the-address-bar .
