John Levine wrote:
Ah, but type a word or two into the IE7 or Firefox address bar and if they don't resolve as a domain name, guess what happens -- the browser passes them to your favorite search engine. People really don't know the difference, and the browsers encourage that confusion. Hence the typosquatting basically steals a name out from what should have been a search that would offer spelling corrections. But so many internet names, especially business names, are not dictionary words. So conventional spelling checkers don't apply.
Until it became a household name Google would have failed most spellcheckers. Perhaps a well-meaning search engine would send the user to "googol.com" instead. I'm not sure if that's a better answer. - Evan