It’s hard enough to find the websites we’re after without also being thwarted by our own clumsiness. While in a perfect world we would mistype a website address and immediately be notified of our careless error, the internet doesn’t work like that. There’s nothing to stop people registering whatever domain name they want, and when thousands of people every day are accidentally ending up at mysoace.com instead of myspace.com, it’s no surprise that some enterprising souls have snapped up the site in question and started to make money.

Thousands of dollars a month can be generated by a popular page of links set up using, say, Google’s AdSense service. Of course, no one is going to deliberately visit a page of links on purpose; they’re only hit by people either guessing badly at an address, or getting .com confused with .net or .org, or misspelling, or just hitting two keys at once. While some companies are wise to this – yahooo.com redirects to yahoo.com, for example, and gooogle.com redirects to google.com – it would be laborious, expensive and futile for anyone to try and register all the conceivable misspellings and mistypings of their domain.

Normally, this doesn’t really present much of a problem. Most people quickly notice their mistake, type in the correct address and proceed on their merry way. And, as “Lob” pointed out on the Cyberclinic blog this week, typing out URLs is becoming old hat for many: “Most of the sites I visit are on a RSS feed. I then explore other links via these – I hardly ever actually do it longhand.” And browsers cleverly auto-completing the addresses of websites you’ve already visited also reduces the possibility of human error.

But as kids are, at least in theory, more likely to misspell than adults, it’s a worry to find – for example – yootube.com throwing up a list of off-colour links. And there’s a common misspelling of hotmail.com that reveals the kind of lurid pornography that would upset children, and drive parents to the edge of panic. Spam, viruses and adware are also common, as “Ant” noted on our blog pages. “Geeks like myself are completely wise to them,” he wrote. “But the same probably can’t be said for people who are significantly younger, older or just more naive.”

Attempting to police the registration of domain names on the suspicion of “typosquatting” (as it’s known) is virtually impossible – there are many geniune websites that just happen to be a keystroke away from another. But McAfee’s Site Advisor – a free download at mcafee.com – claims to be actively fighting the menace, by yellow or red-flagging any site that triggers its typosquatting criteria. This will, presumably, will be a blow to the person currently making money out of the URL mcafeee.com.