The Internet's "Trash Traffic"
I find it really irritating when Internet Explorer takes me to a search engine when I've typed in the wrong URL for a website. I'd rather not get anything so that I can correct the typo. According to this Wall Street Journal story (subscription required) millions of people do the same thing every day:
This "trash traffic," as some call it, may seem worthless. But a growing number of companies are finding creative ways to, in effect, recycle it. AOL Time Warner Inc.'s America Online and Microsoft Corp., for instance, direct users who botch some Web addresses to the companies' Internet search engines, where they often display advertisements.
...In a potentially significant development, VeriSign Inc. is privately testing a service that could let it direct large portions of trash traffic to Web sites of its choosing, according to people familiar with the matter.
The Mountain View, Calif., company operates the largest Internet "registry" -- a master directory with listings that enable Web users and e-mails to reach Internet addresses ending in the popular ".com" and ".net" suffixes...In effect, VeriSign will be capturing error-prone users before the software from companies like Microsoft and AOL can nab them, potentially shifting significant sums of traffic away those sites.