Omit a letter, spoil a website

Richard Gray of St. Louis writes:

“Are you aware that if you accidentally leave out the ‘y’, as I just did, www.overlawered.com takes one to a gaudy Asian website, reminiscent of a Japanese pachinko parlor?

“Apropos of nothing, but wondered if you had ever experienced that.”

Never experienced it until just now. Readers who understand Japanese Chinese, or relevant issues of web promotion, are welcome to chime in.

6 Comments

  • That site is in Chinese, not Japanese. Looks like ads for on-line gaming sites.

  • That’s Chinese, not Japanese. Was pretty sure when I didn’t see any hiragana or katakana, and Google Translate confirms. It’s website for a casino in or related to Macau. Probably a real casino (i.e. not online only), from what the portion I translated said. Here’s a portion translated:

    Macao Venetian official website] Macao Venetian official website, registration automatically send 18 lottery, no limit for withdrawal
    [Venice VIP VIP] Exclusive 24-hour customer service, VIP professional line, fast deposit and withdrawal time, monthly good luck, promotion grade VIP have a gift [Get it immediately

    Fun facts: about 7 times as much gambling goes on in Macau as compared to Vegas, and it is the most densely populated region of the world, but only the tenth most densely populated city.

  • Typo hijacking. It is a common enough thing. Just be thankful it is not an adult site or a phishing site. You can, if you want, go through the effort and cost of registering all possible typos of your web site and all possible TLD versions of your site (e.g. overlawyered.org, .biz, .net, etc.)

    I wouldn’t be surprised if someone is squatting on all those things already.

  • An anonymous commenter points out that similar-name domain squats go back a long way, and have often involved porn sites, as in the notorious one that duplicated the President of the United States’s whitehouse.gov but with a .com instead of the .gov. Similarly for altered addresses for popular game enthusiast and entertainment sites.

    I knew about all that, but am still surprised that Overlawyered’s URL would be frequently enough typed to make it worth squatting on a misspelling, and for the sake of promoting gambling in a language other than English. Now if the idea had been to promote a 1-800 lawyer hotline in the U.S., that would be different…

  • Jackpot Justice, anyone?

  • OK this is the man referenced who found the site…..I didn’t mean to imply by saying the site is “reminiscent of a Japanese pachinko parlor” that I thought it was written in Japanese. I don’t think Walter did, either, by quoting me. I am well aware that those are Chinese characters. Still, the site does indeed remind me of a Japanese pachinko parlor…the flashiness that induces seizures, the colors, etc. Just not the characters.