Google Chrome has Lookalike URLs warning protection in place to caution and make users navigate away when they visit sites that contain URLs similar to popular sites. The suggestion says is this your intention to visit that particular site such as Google.com and warns “The site you just tried to visit looks fake. Attackers sometimes mimic sites by making small, hard-to-see changes to the URL”.
Chrome has related setting enabled from v75 to say “Show similar suggestions for pages when pages can’t be found”, Microsoft Edge now has this feature turned on by default in version 82 for Dev and Canary builds with the wording for setting “Suggest similar sites when a website can’t be found”.
Here is how the feature supposed to work: if you stumbled onto a site by wrongly entering a site URL than intended in address bar and if the site works or doesn’t exist, based on your visit to sites from browsing history and if similar popular domain exists, Chromium Edge offers suggestion to head to similar or popular site instead of staying on current page which could be fake or suspicious domain created by attackers with intent to steal your private information. Here user engagement score is taken into consideration for suggesting a site.
Do note here unlike Chrome where it sends site address to Google, new Edge sends the website address to Microsoft/Bing to find and display the correct site in the user browser. Edge Developer’s Eric Lawrence tweet confirms the feature existence in Canary build.
— Eric Lawrence 🎻 (@ericlaw) February 24, 2020
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