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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.
SiteFinder broke DNS for the purpose of making money. 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; MS is just taking the idea further (and making money off it, because they love money). I can see people being miffed by the fact that there are ads on the search page, but it's not as if Google doesn't have ads on their search pages.
This is basically just a bunch of advertisers and domain squatters getting upset because Microsoft and Google are making money and they aren't.
using namespace slashdot;
troll::post();
Well if you're gonna do the wrong thing, you at least might as well do it the right way.
Verisign literally broke DNS in their attempt. This cash grab is confined to software that can easily be switched from.
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The last digit of pi is four.
Sitefinder is EVIL. While this is just fine.
Sitefinder was implemented with a wildcard DNS record. This means that any typo gets resolved anyway. So suppose there's a mail server running on that machine for some reason. Now all the mail you send to the wrong domain name gets sent to that server instead of failing directly.
In this case, two things may happen, both of them very undesirable:
If it bounces, then that will confuse many people as they won't realize they made a typo and think they got the account name wrong, or that the person cancelled their account. It also results in your probably private mail getting sent to some random server for absolutely no good reason.
The more evil possibility is that the server will accept your mail, which would be the exact same thing they do for websites. Then maybe it will reply with an ad, or perhaps just keep it. Anything can happen in this case really.
This is the problem with sitefinder: DNS isn't just for websites, and it would break quite a lot of things.
On the other hand, IE sending the user to some page with ads is perfectly fine. It's IE specific, it doesn't interfer with your mail or anything else, and it's probably a configuration option you can disable. And you certainly won't get it if you don't use MS software.
All IE7 does is go to the search page OF YOUR CHOICE if you misspell something. I have IE7 configured with Google as my default search engine, and when I type in lexus-financail.com I go to Google's search page, which I find is a very helpful feature.
Sheesh, it's like people don't even TRY with the FUD anymore.
This article is stupid. It's just takes you to the default search engine (which is usually Microsoft), and offers you a spelling correction, which then performs the search. THEN it shows you the search results, which has -- ADS. OH MY GOD!!
In other news, typing the same string into Google (or any other search engine) also shows search results -- WITH ADS.
Man, I've really busted the conspiracy WIDE ASS OPEN.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
Really, I think this is a "non-issue". You're not locked in to Live.com or any other search site. Microsoft "makes" Internet Explorer, why wouldn't they set the default to Live.com? Why shouldn't they? You can always change it...
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
look at the absurd pricing of the domains.. yes 9.99 a year is EXPENSIVE
What?
I'm a grad student. If I had gone out into industry I'd be making probably six times what I am while I'm in school. I'm cheap: I don't have a car, I have an apartment rather than a house, I'm using a mostly 4 1/2 year-old computer. The one thing I splurge on is living alone. And I don't think that $9.99/yr is expensive.
Discover Magazine is $25/year.
The cheaper of the two local papers has a special on delivery of $40/20 weeks ($104/year at the intro rate -- $214 normally)
I pay about $10/month for phone; most people seem to pay at least 3x that if they have a cell
My hot water comes to about $10/month, my electricity and gas to $50/mth, my heat the last two bills to $90/month (and the newest bill will probably be rather more once I get it), and my rent to $625/month.
Most people have car payments plus insurance of (I think) over $100/mth.
$9.99/year is 83 cents/month. At federal minimum wage, that's 6 minutes 20 seconds per month.
If you think that's expensive, then you don't need a domain.
shhhhh. Just because Microsoft is invariably mentioned in any story about Google, that doesn't mean that you can mention Google in any Microsoft stories.
Would you kindly mod me +1 insightful?
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.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
They stole this feature from Firefox! How dare they!
Seriously, since when is defaulting to a -chosen- search engine being monopolistic? I mean, technically, AOL sent you to AOL's search page whether you liked it or not.
There are plenty more things to be critical of MS then this, don't waste perfectly good flame time on silly things.
I type "Lexus-Financail.com" into my address bar and IE automatically routes it to a Google search that suggests Lexus-Financial.com. Whenever IE doesn't find a server that you type in the address bar, it redirects to a search using your default search hooks. Mine are set to Google and it uses Google to search. If IE just showed a blank "Server not found" page it wouldn't be broken, but it could easily be argued that using your default search provider to try and find your intended server (in event of a "not found") is useful behavior.
At the end of the day, this isn't "evil" behavior. They aren't preventing people from accessing a legitimate site, they are providing relevant search results instead of a generic error screen. They may garner some ad revenue in the process but they haven't programmed the browser in a way that they are the only ones who could benefit from the behavior. And unless the user is paying their ISP per-bit at an extremely expensive rate, there's no monetary damage to the user.
News for nerds, stuff that matters?
IE and other browsers have had a "search from the address bar" feature for a long time. And it's user-configurable.
So this isn't news and it doesn't matter.
Whats wrong with a perfectly normal DNS error?
They are using the 404 response correctly, this is what it was designed for! IE is trying to do something intellligent when it knows that the page is missing. What verisign did was fool every program (including IE) into thinking *all* pages exist, which breaks anything that wants to respond in a useful way to the page being mistyped.
I checked on a Windows machine, and they even let you change it! Didn't even bury it too deep in the configuration! You can go to google or bash-microsoft.net and thus the mistyped domains probably can hurt them!
Microsoft does plenty of evil and stupid things, but this is not amoung them.
...accurately.
End of problem.
IE7 has the search bar over on the right, but if you start typing something in the address bar, it auto-populates with stuff you might want- for example, if I type 'sla' into the address bar, I get 4 suggestions:
'Slashdot: News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters' -- title of the main page, cribbed from my favorites
'http://slashdot.org/article[...]' --recently visited page at slashdot, from history
'http://slashdot.org/article[...]' --recently visited page at slashdot, from history
'search for sla' -- takes you to a search page
I also noticed while testing this out that it behaves differently at work than it did at home last night: from behind my work's firewall, the search redirect page I expected to see was blocked- instead I got a firewall-blocked-this-page error.
If there's one thing I won't stand for, it's intolerance.