COIMBATORE: Students are left in a flurry of confusion while applying online for postgraduate courses at Tamil Nadu Government Arts and Science Colleges (TNGASA), as a doppelganger website will pop up, probably in an attempt to poach some clicks off the official portal. Lakhs of students visit the website during admission time, said sources.
If you type ‘TNGASA’ on search engines, two domains will appear, the official one with ‘.in’ extension and a lookalike with ‘.com’ extension. The Directorate of Collegiate Education’s (DCE) lethargy to purchase domains with other extensions is blamed as the reason behind the confusion. Students applying for Tamil Nadu Engineering Admissions also face a similar plight, with sources from DCE admitting that someone also purchased the ‘.in’ domain, which will appear in the second spot on search engines. Officers who manage the portal did not purchase any domains except ‘.org’, they added.
P Deepak, a student in Coimbatore, told TNIE, “Recently, I searched for the TNGASA website to apply for a postgraduate course. On it, two websites with the same name, TNGASA, appeared. When I hurriedly clicked on the second website, which had a ‘.com’ domain, except for the admission process, there were details of all arts and science colleges with advertisements offered by Google.”
An assistant professor at a government college in Salem said several students who completed Class 12 faced the same trouble. A web developer, P Naveen from Coimbatore, said that the DCE should have purchased other domains such as ‘.com’, ‘.net’ and ‘.org.
“Since the department failed to do this, someone could have purchased the ‘.com’ extension and then launched and operated a website with the same name. Practically, it is legal. The fault rests with the department, which neglected to acquire the domains priced under Rs 5,000 annually,” he said.
Government departments should form new websites with a ‘.gov’ name, which would prevent private entities from misusing such websites, he added.
“When a second website appears with the same name, a large number of students will definitely visit the same website organically. Through this, the owner of the website can earn more money using Google AdSense,” he explained.