What is the best online people search company to use?

What percentage of people use search to get to business website vs typing its url into address bar?

• My friend's company(lets call it SomeThingsAreWorthTheMoney ) has been affected by a competitor's cybersquatting attack. SomeThingsAreWorthTheMoney is primarily an offline, real-world company that delivers real world services to local customers.  Its been around for well over 10 years and has been using a domain stawtmoney.com(again domain is made up) for a long time. Its direct competitor has acquired a domain name SomeThingsAreWorthTheMoney.com and has been selling its own real-world services to the customer in the same locale. Its been going on for at least a year until SomeThingsAreWorthTheMoney has found out. So when you google for 'Some Things Are Worth The Money"(name of the company, again made-up, with spaces), the actual company's site (stawtmoney.com) comes up in the results. However, when you type in the cybersquatted name(somethingsareworththemoney.com), the competitors website offering their services would come up. My friend is looking to estimate what damages did his company receive due to this cybersquatting. One way to do this is to figure out a percentage of users usually get to the website they are looking for by typing in an address in the address bar vs typing in a company name in the search bar. Are there any legitimate studies or reports that provide this sort of statistics?

• Answer:

  Not sure about the exact percentage of people typing people in address bar; However, cybersquatters are essentially causing interference in your being googled because if they have registered your domain name, any person typing your name, 9 times out of 10 will jump to the squatted site, not your own. Its almost impossible to put a price on what damage a cybersquatter can do but here is a short list of possible effects a cybersquatter can have on your business or personal profile: - can post negative information about you, therefore reducing your reputation - can redirect visitors/customers looking for your product, to their own product - can hold you to ransom by owning the domain attempting to extort money - can profit from the popularity of your name by selling it on However, to avoid such situation, you may take following actions: 1. Register Your Own Business Name as a .com Domain and Have a registered trademark. 2. Register the other main TLD versions such as .net, .co.uk, .name, .org, .info 3. Register any possible typos of the domain in the .com versions 4. If you are a company, register all TLD’s and any misspellings 5. If the domains are important, register them a  few years in advance 6. Make sure the domains are set to auto renew so they dont accidentally expire