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Microsoft "SiteFinder" Quietly Raking It In
An anonymous reader writes in with the news, which isn't particularly new, that Microsoft's Internet Explorer sends typo domain names to a page of pay-per-click ads. In this endeavor Microsoft joins Charter and Earthlink in profiting from the dubious practice that Verisign pioneered but failed to make stick. The article is on a site whose audience is, among others, those who attempt to profit by typo-squatting, and its tone is just a bit petulant because individuals cannot hope to profit in this game on the scale Microsoft effortlessly achieves.
Rakes in millions (billions?) from shady parked domain farms that run AdWords.
Web2.0: I love when people Flickr my cuil and digg my boingboing until my google is reddit and I start to yahoo
Going to http://www.lexus-financail.com/ site in IE 7 with no default search engine yields
So if you want to make untold millions as well, build (a) search engine and (b) popular web browser, and make (a) the default in (b).
I tried what the article said to do. I have Google set as my default IE search engine. It just did a Google search for the incorrect domain. This seems like a feature (albeit one that I dislike) rather than some money grabbing scam.
Come on, if we want to bash MS, and especially IE, we can do much better than this.
The Sitefinder you mention is nothing of the sort. What you are experiencing is IE7's auto-search feature. If you set your default search to Google, you'll get google search results with the same thing as IE.
Here is the first page from the blog, with me typing in the same search as the blog does.
Now here is what I get after I hit enter.
Meet new people, and kill them.
I highly recommend OpenDNS, available for free at http://www.opendns.com./ They also redirect your typos to a search page, but you can brand the pages with your own logos. They provide many other useful services such as phishing site blocking and DNS usage statistics. You don't even need an account to use their DNS servers, if you don't want the statistics and custom settings.
/24 networks registered with them now, and I can't thank them enough. I have zero DNS problems now, and it even seems much faster.
I have 7
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Intelligence should not be rewarded; ignorance should be punished
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Firefox makes money off of it too. Google pays Fire Fox a lot of money for those searches.
This is just a 'feature' similar to the one in Firefox that automatically performs a google search on things you enter into the URL bar if they aren't valid addresses
That's not true. If it actually looks like an address to Firefox (i.e. it has a period in it and no spaces), then you get a "Server not found" page with the "Try Again" button. The important thing (to me, at least) is that Firefox leaves the url alone when this happens, so you can just correct your mistake and hit enter. IE makes you delete the long address they put in there and start over.
In the absence of an MX record e-mail gets delivered to the A record — MX records are optional. If none is found, the request is made for the A-record, and that gets used instead.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
No, Firefox is not doing this! When you type in a domain name that doesn't exist, you get the following:
(Note: "domain name" means something in the form foo.TLD, not just a word. Words get interpreted as search terms, which do get sent to Google.)
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Compared to leaving it in the address like Firefox does, IE's practice of forcing me to copy and paste it back from the search field is incredibly (and needlessly!) annoying.
Tools -> options -> Advanced -> Scroll down to "Search from Address Bar" -> [*] "Do not search from addressbar"
Do you Gentoo!?
The last time /. released browser stats, which was, IIRC, before the rise of Firefox, it actually ended up showing something like 70%+ of users were IE, to which there were a lot of hasty "oh, uh, well, I guess it's people having to use IE at work, or something..."
Funny, if I replace that "M$" with Google re Firefox, it seems to fit the same mould. ... Like when my Firefox start page went from mozilla.com to google.com, you mean?
My homepage has never been changed by any gnu/linux distribution. I can't tell you what happens on Windoze.
When I make a typo in Konqueror I get the error message quoted before. Firefox gives the following:
That is not a typo squat or selling of eyeballs, it's honest reporting of an error.
Enjoy your favorite OS, it's enjoying you.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
Could you be any more misinformed. MSIE drops any nonexistent addresses (assuming you didn't configure it not to) into your default search engine. That can be Live, Google, Yahoo, Altavista, Ask.com, Baidu, even Dogpile if you're crazy. If you prefix it with "http://", then IE will NOT search for you, it will bail with "Cannot find server". There is no money for Microsoft if you a) set a different search engine as your default, b) disable searching from the address bar in Internet Options or c) enter in an address that CLEARLY is a domain name (i.e. has a protocol prefix) but is not correct
Oh, and the consumer likely appreciates Microsoft's approach more. Stop spreading idiocy.
For a site about things like basic rights, Slashdot users sure do like to censor "dissent".
It's really not as bad as described. If you do mistype a domain name in Internet Explorer all it does is a search for it in the _default_ search engine. This of course happens to be Live search, but the default can easily be changed. Thus, since my default search engine in IE is Google (surprise!), mistyping a domain name takes me too Google search, which by the way also contains PPC ads.