The National Arbitration Forum, a legal alternate to court, has upheld a complaint from Google against Sergey Gridasov of St. Petersburg, Russia over "typosquatting".

Gridasov has been operating Web sites named googkle.com, ghoogle.com and gooigle.com, far too close to Google.com for the Search leader's comfort. The main concern has been that these addresses are too easily input as genuine typographical errors - the phoney site then hits the unsuspecting visitor with a virus or some other invasive malicious software. Google registered its domain name in 1999 a year after the search engine was launched - Gridasov, according to the filed complaint, registered his Web sites in December 2000 and January 2001 - capitalising on Google's popularity.

Arbitrator Paul A. Dorf's decision endorsed Google's contention that the spelling of the addresses was deliberately close to Google.com and a route to infecting computers with programs known as "malware" - leading to system crashes, data corruption or destruction and allowing access to sensitive information.

The Russian didn't respond to Google's complaint filed May 11th enabling the arbitrator to "accept all reasonable allegations as true".

On Friday, AP e-mailed the address that Gridasov listed when he registered the sites. The response, not signed by Gridasov, accepted that the spellings were designed to attract more hits, but said there hadn't been any complaints until the sites began posting code from another company, which assured it wouldn't cause any trouble.

F-Secure, a Finnish company specializing in identifying malware, identified googkle.com as a troublemaker in an advisory posted April 26, three weeks before Google filed its complaint. Leeching off the popularity of a busy site is a well worn gambit - it's been going on since the very earliest days of search engines with close named sites being used to divert unsuspecting searchers - often into pornography.

The Google brand is one of the most trusted on the Internet and its Web site attracts more than 66 million unique monthly visitors, making it an inviting target for scheming opportunists.

Reuben Dunn
Jump2Top.Com