In a shrewd move that many (probably most) companies don’t consider before launching a new product or service, Microsoft went ahead and purchased many Bing related typo domain names prior to launch. Some of the domain names now owned by Microsoft include, Bimg.com, Bibg.com, Bihg.com, and Binf.com.
All of these typo domain names were previously owned by other people and companies before Microsoft acquired them. One common link between these names is that it appears they were acquired by a company known as Media Market of Boise, Idaho between being owned by the former owner and Microsoft. You can see the Whois lookup for Bibg.com from February as an example.
One interesting domain acquisition they made was Bing.com. The reason it’s particularly interesting to me is that it was previously owned by General Mills, another Fortune 500 company.
Unfortunately, there were many Bing typos that Microsoft didn’t and/or couldn’t acquire. Among them include Bong.com, Bingo.com, Bin.com, Big.com, and Ing.com. I don’t know if the traffic increase can be linked directly with the Bing launch, but just look at the Compete scores for Bong.com, Bung.com and Bin.com after May.
And they don’t have http://wwwbing.com 😉
Daniel and Elliot, I guess they have read this http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/10/16/a-troll-squats-on-wwwbing-com-literally/ and figured out they have to do something with typos.
Dear Elliot,
I think Microsoft (Aaron Kornblum) has always been very sensitive to their trademarks.
Microsoft has more than 25.000 typos.
Na… This is not a new thing… Seen this story before -about four years ago – regarding Yahoo search.
try –
yhoo.com
and
yaho.com
and
yahho.com
and many others…. You will be taken to Yahoo….