There’s google, here
And then there’s these
folks.
Now my browser jumps to the interlopers unless I type the entire word “google”. No big thing, really.
But I was wondering. Isn’t there some kind of rule or copyright law that forbids this kind of chicanery? I know it’s illegal for a soap manufacturer to sell laundry detergent in a yellow and orange box and call it “Tides”. Same-o, right?
Peace,
mangeorge
Looks like Google might have a case under the Anticybersquatting Consumer Protection Act. But then they might also have to go after these cute li’l guys.
I don’t know about the legality or impermissibility of it, but it’s not unique to Google/Googl. There’s a Yahoo! interloper (www.yaoho.com), a Lycos interloper (www.lcyos.com), and the ever-famous whitehouse.com, a porn site. (The real White House is http://www.whitehouse.gov .) However, both http://www.gooogle.com and http://www.yahooo.com redirect to Google and Yahoo! respectively.
If I click on one of your links, then I’m going to get stuck with googl.com coming up in my browser every time I want Google. I’m glad I thought of that before I clicked.
You can stop googl.com from showing up by erasing your browser history.
Most major sites have this problem. Even a relatively small website I used to work on, www.massassi.net has a similar address that sends you to a porn page. I forget what it is off the top of my head. www.massasi.com or something along those lines… The same goes for our forum address.
[deleted] , that is. A moot point, but just in case someone was interested in visiting Hanky Panky College.
Oops! Sorry, I didn’t think of that. Which is exactly how I got it.
I’ll do as friedo suggests. Thanks. 
BTW; leave the cute little googles alone. At least they aren’t trying to usurp google’s domain name.
Peace,
mangeorge
Slugworth,
I’ve removed the link in your post. While I sympathize with your problem, we don’t allow links to porn on this board.
DrMatrix - General Questions Moderator
Not to complain, because as I said, it was a moot point, but curiosity is killing this cat, and just for future reference. Why’d my link get killed and not the references to other porn sites, like whitehouse.com? Just that it was a direct link?
… answered before I hit reply. Sometimes an edit button would be nice 
Thanks, friedo. Worked like a charm. All’s normal now.
mangeorge
Then there’s nasa.com (porn) and nasa.gov (government thing). Don’t want to go into how I found that out. Let’s just say I was looking for photos of the sun at school…
Hmm, I remember accidentally tuning into some AM call-in show and hearing this woman who was horrified that when she decided to look up the Promise Keepers online–and just assumed that pk.com would belong to them–she got porn. And why isn’t there a law?
I liked this one just because of the assumption that any two letter abbreviation isn’t used by at least fifty different groups.
And this whole issue underscores just how far the Internet has spread from the purpose it was designed for: it was originally called the ARPANet and was designed to provide decentralized, blast-proofed computer communcations for the military if the Rooshians ever got the first strike.
Of course, that is the Internet as a whole, not the web. The web began as a small NCSA project, born when it released Mosaic, the first web browser. This was the killer app of the 90s, because it made the Internet palatable to people who didn’t like to read (none of the other Internet protocols are as graphics-ridden as http is, and the web is http).
Notice something about both of those projects? Neither was meant for mass consumption. ARPANet could well have remained classified had the DoD so chose, and Mosaic was created by a university. Quite simply, the Internet and the web had greatness foist upon them, and have had to try, stumbling, to keep up.
(What does this have to do with anything? I’m getting there…)
This is illustrated in how domain names are handed out. Domain names are text strings like ‘googl.com’ and ‘nasa.gov’ that substitute for IP addresses (the four-part dotted numbers I illustrated above, aka dotted quads) so humans can navigate the web. They’re given out by ICANN, a quasi-offical body with the support of the US government and almost nobody else. ICANN has made bad moves in the past, and now it’s time for it to die (gone, like farts in the wind). The fact that there is only one corrupt body adjudged competent (by an incompetent government, mind you) to hand out domain names is testament to how borked the web has become and how ad hoc its growth has been.
Hm. My post has become borked itself.
IP numbers are numbers computers use to talk to each other across the Internet. They can be represented in almost any way, but the usual form is four decimal numbers in the range [0…255] seperated by periods, or dots. Hence the name ‘dotted quads’.
Regarding the Google issue, you can download either a toolbar (for IE) or a bookmark (Moz/Netscape). Then it’s just one click away.
At any rate, bookmarks defeat these “interlopers” handily.
Erase your browqser history.
For Netscape 7.0, you can go to Preferences; select Navigator -> Internet Search. Then select Google (or Lycos, Music: Artist by Spinner, Netscape Search, or Overture) from the Search Using: menu. Then when you want to search using Google, you just put your search arguements into the location bar.