۞ from Central Europe to the web ۞: How Much Does a Domain like google.hu Worth?

During the las few years Google let domainsquatters make money from pages like google.by, google.cz, google.hu. Now that they finally acquired google.hu, one might think about how much profit a measure like this can generate? Is it enough to pay the attorneys? This post attempts to answer this question:

Users who typed in this address during the last three years, used to land at this page:

Instead of this:

As you can see, the page where google.hu was redirected (kurzor.hu) was not deceptive at all, (unlike google.by) so you might think that for the majority of the visitors it was obvious that they arrived at the wrong page. Curiously enough it was not clear for everybody, some folks were sure that they used Google when they in fact used a worse search engine developed by a Hungarian company:

Not only comments appearing on my site –where I wrote about what google.hu really was– were clear evidence of this misbelief, but also the large number of results when you searched for google.hu. Google shows 389000 results for "google.hu" while 902000 results for "google.co.hu" and Yahoo! displays 1130 inbound links for google.hu

These facts may help us to determine the value of this domain name, but luckily enough we can get more accurate data too, since kurzor.hu is monitored by webaudit.hu where you can get detailed information about the number of unique visitors, number of visits, and page impressions. These data (this Wednesday –first entire day without the redirection– compared to last Wednesday's traffic) show that the due to the lack of this redirect the site lost approximately