The Washington Post reports that Google is making millions of dollars a year by filling otherwise unused Web sites with ads, many times designed to come up when someone mistypes an Internet address, such as BistBuy.com.Google bans Web addresses that infringe on trademarks from using its ad network, but a review of placeholder Web sites that result from misspelled domain names of well-known companies found many of the ads on those pages come directly from Google, the report said.Google was awarded in July last year the rights to several website addresses that relied on typographical errors to exploit its popularity so computer viruses and other malicious software could be unleashed on unsuspecting visitors. The Post said it “generated roughly 100 random misspellings of “www.earthlink.net” and found 38 sites using variations of the Earthlink name “parked” at a Google-owned service called Oingo.com. All 38, which includes “dearthlink.net” and “rearthlink.net,” serve Google ads.As TechDirt notes, the trademark claim in The Post story “is pretty silly, since it’s pretty hard to imagine many people being confused into thinking a typosquatting site like hmoedepot.com is the actual homedepot.com site it’s aping.”TD says the space is “attracting a lot of attention from companies who say the sites can function as additions to search engines.” “There’s no doubt that these companies are grabbing low-hanging fruit, but the bigger issue, particularly for typosquatters, is that their business could get stamped out, either by misguided trademark lawsuits, or by technology,” TD writes.Is Google not acting fast to stamp out typosquatting to avoid any more bad PR? Technology Industry