it looks to me like google just took possession of a bunch of domain names once registered by spammers that contain a version of the word "google"

as most of these domains seem to have been registered a while ago.

perhaps just trying to protect the brand name?

however that doesn't explain the deweycheatum reference..

I see quite a few mis-spellings on this list, e.g. googlgroups.com, goole-wi-fi.com, googlesecureaxcess.com etc

Whoever is registering these mis-spellings can't have worked out the combinatorial explosion else they would realise it's totally impractical to cover them all.

How much traffic are they going to lose to "googlgroups.com" anyway?

Maybe they also want to protect the Google brand from phishing attacks?

Google is starting a service similar to Microsoft Office Live.

Your-Company-Site.com and Your-Online-Site.com will be examples that glorfiy the service like NorthwindTraders.com (Which is now redirected to Microsoft)

That's what I think.

My first association with Your-Online-Site.com was Google Page Creator, but it doesn't really make sense admittedly...

They use random urls like that in thier api documentation. maybe they just want it for the same reason example.com can't be registered.

Phillip I was thinking the same thing, maybe they'll look to expand it to Small Businesses and Corporate Environment.

Urchin for Tracking.
A Blog powered by Blogger.
We can already use "Gadgets"
Gmail for Domains.

Should be interesting.

Or Google is just trying to keep us busy so we don't find the real thing.

There is a quite simple way, how one can use Google to creat a phishing scenario.

I'm in the middle of reasearching this case. I will post the results here in a few days.

Your-Company-Site.com, in france Google have bought "votre-societe.fr" ("your-company.fr")
Strange...