EarthLink Establishes Their Own "Site Finder"

Guppy06 writes "Last week, instead of a regular DNS error, EarthLink's DNS servers started to return a redirect to earthlink-help.net, a site that bears a close resemblance to VeriSign's much-maligned Site Finder, to their subscribers. According to their official blog at Earthling, "By presenting users with contextual help based upon the non-existent domain the user entered, we believe we are improving the EarthLink user experience with a system that will not interfere with other network processes." Most of the responses in said blog posting aren't positive."

Comments

1 Cancellation

[DrunkenTerror]

I've kept an Earthlink dial-up account in case I took my notebook on a road trip. I haven't used it in a while though, and have been meaning to cancel it. I think I'll go ahead and take care of that now, and I'll make a point of telling the rep about this.

icann should ban this

[a_greer2005]

There has to be some way that this sort of crap can be banned, it breaks the internet, because the error code is now a "valid" page!

The "Unix Way" vs "Everyone Else"

[BadAnalogyGuy]

Here on /. the general zeitgeist follows what is commonly called the "Unix way". Things should be kept small and only do one thing, but do it well. Developers can gain power by tying these simpler components together.

The other way of thinking can be termed the "Microsoft way" or even better "Apple way". This viewpoint believes that integrating things into easy-to-use applications leads to greater productivity gains as well as a more pleasant user experience. Instead of giving a ton of pieces to the user and expect them to make sense of it all, this viewpoint presents a fully-formed solution to the user.

The Unix Way zealots will tell you that undermining this dirt road area of the internet by returning useful results instead of an error message is bad. The Microsoft/Apple Way zealots will argue that something useful is always better than an inscrutable error message.

The side you fall on is really a viewpoint issue, and not a technical one. There is no technical reason why Earthlink's move couldn't be worked around, if that is really a good solution. There's also no technical reason why Earthlink needs to go ahead with something like this when search engines are already built into most modern browsers.

Solution: Use a different DNS server in settings

[MoNickels]

I noticed the Earthlink change this week and immediately put a non-Earthlink DNS server at the top of my DNS servers list. My browser now returns the proper "can't find server" message and not Earthlink's advertising. (If you do this, please consider the ethical implications of using another provider's DNS server if you do not subscribe to that provider.)

Re:Profit is the Motive

[techno-vampire]

I, OTOH, was working for Earthlink when the merger came. Our stock price dropped by well over 40%, never to recover. When I saw the way we were expected to configure Mindspring customers, I was horrified, because Mindspring was, among other things, using three DNS servers on the same Class C; one router goes and no DNS! I have to say that at least half the things I found bad about Earthlink in all the time I was there, came from Mindspring. I'm sure your POV is valid, and I'm not disputing you. I just wanted to show things from the other side.

That being said, even before the Earthlink/Mindspring thing, Earthlink had changed from a fairly savvy ISP to a company that jumped on every bandwagon that came down the pike without asking itself if the idea was any good. Thinking back, I suspect that about a year or so before the merger, the marketing department got control of the company, and it really showed. This is just another example of what happens when technical decisions are made by people with neither the undestanding to do the right thing nor an interest in learning what the issues really are.