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The most confusing new gTLDs (allegedly)

Kevin Murphy, March 26, 2010, Domain Registries

I don’t know how I missed it until today, but I’ve discovered ICANN has a web-based tool that will be used to determine whether new gTLDs could be confused with existing strings.
The Sword Group algorithm compares applied-for strings with a list of existing TLDs and reserved words such as “icann” and “ripe”.
It looks for “visual similarity”, which means not only common sequences of characters but also the pixel-by-pixel similarities of each character.
Numerical scores are assigned. Any match scoring below 30 is not considered worthy of reporting.
As an experiment, I ran each of the strings on newTLDs.tv’s list of publicly announced TLD hopefuls through the available “pre-production” algorithm.
Here are my findings.
1. The algorithm is pretty much worthless. (continue reading)