Sometimes the mistakes happen because one hand types a letter faster than the other on a keyboard. Such was the case when I typed in the URL for www.dictionary.com a few minutes ago. d-i-c-t-i-o-n-y-r went into the address bar of the browser. Up came a page from an online company that lives at the interstices of the web, apparently harvesting misspellings of high traffic URLs to inflate statistics of visitor rates. The misspelled URL redirects the traffic to another page. I can only guess that these traffic rates are shown to advertisers to sell them placement on a search engine run by the company.
While I didn't want to be on the search engine in the first place, insult was added to injury by a message box asking me the following:
Would you like to set your homepage to 'http://www.dotzup.biz/home1meta.php'?Thanks, guys, but no thanks. Really, no thanks. Please don't modify the settings on my browser.
