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

Downmod me to hell, but...

[falsified]

If I'm lazy and screw up a web address, and a search page comes up offering the correct address, then good for it. Of course it generates revenue for the firm that produces the search page. Why the hell shouldn't it? There's a moneymaking opportunity there. As long as the web page isn't cluttered with images and Flash and shit, it's no skin off my back, and it's more useful than "server not found". It's not as if this is some browser hijack program - this is a customer's ISP offering an ISP-related service.

From the article: "The system is specifically configured to handle only NXDOMAIN HTTP traffic as it is being returned to the user's browser and to not impact email and other non-web-browsing traffic."