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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.
It's weird, but I don't mind Sitefinder. It's a lot less annoying than the people who set up sites that spawn eight and a half billion popup ads. I suppose Microsoft really can be the lesser of two evils... ... oh, God. I didn't actually say that, did I?
Eviscerati.Org: All Hail the Eviscerati
Microsoft's Internet Explorer sends typo domain names to a page of pay-per-click ads
Typ0wned!
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
It took me long to come here and post this since I was searching for slahsdot.org on IE..
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
Did Verisign pioneer it? I seem to recall that Microsoft's "feature" came before Verisign tried to do it universally.
I wonder if this might be something the Firefox side of the house could use. Rake in additional cash for the Mozilla foundation and help users. Given the relationship they already seem to have with Google, I doubt this would prove too much of a problem.
Of course, an option should be available for users who do not wish to use the service.
Yes, I am a smart ass; it's better than the alternative.
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();
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).
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.
--
The last digit of pi is four.
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.
Have google set as my default search engine and it took me to http://www.google.com/search?q=lexus-financail.com . Thats without the http:/// part, as per the article. If I put the http:/// part, it gives me a 'Cannot find server or DNS Error' error page.
Have you ever been to a turkish prison?
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.
is actively testing it. From their perspective, it's free money.
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
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.
When I type in their mis-spelled domain name into IE6's address bar, I don't get the advertising page they say I should. All I get is the page from IE saying the hostname couldn't be resolved.
I think the article is conflating two things: manipulation of the DNS network to return actual A records for domains that don't exist vs. IE redirecting any request that yields a DNS error to a pre-configured page. The first breaks all uses of names, the second only breaks IE. The first is a fatal problem because it affects software that doesn't have a human being to interpret the data, may not be able to handle contact with arbitrary hosts and may easily depend on getting accurate "record does not exist" answers from DNS. The second is merely a major annoyance because there's usually a human being sitting there to see the page, get annoyed and fix the configuration so that doesn't happen again.
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.
FireFox has its default page set to Google. Wonder how much that rakes in for Google (and Mozilla)? Come on folks, good for the goose and all...
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
Yep, I second that, on my DELL provided machine, the default search engine is DELL branded Google, and it is providing the paid ads from Google on the search.
I have to agree with whomever said that this is nowhere near as bad as SiteFinder - you have full control over this and it does not break DNS service. Besides, what do I care, I stopped using IE years ago.:-)
-Em
RelevantElephants: A Somatic WebComic...
Searching from the address bar is an option in IE7, as it was in IE6 and others before. If you dont like this behavior (regardless of your search engine), just turn it off!
The user still has a little bit of control with this part, unlike Verisigns' overdone version. (for once. Nice of them, innit)
You have no idea what you're talking about. Verisign has NO control beyond administrative. ICANN controls everything, and mandates what the ccTLD registries can do. Verisign only does what ICANN allows. And stop bitching about your USD$9.99 a year. In NZ, our domains are NZD$30 a year (with NZD$2.75 per month going to our central registry, and the infinitesmal profit for the actual registrar)
For a site about things like basic rights, Slashdot users sure do like to censor "dissent".
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.
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
==========
Intelligence should not be rewarded; ignorance should be punished
==========
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 it doesn't, it gives you the original address you typed in the search field so you can just correct it and hit search or copy and paste it back into your address bar. The Try Again approach is nicer in my opinion but it doesn't make it harder to see what address you entered to begin with.
It's not about afordability. It's about expense that is inflated.
True, but what's the alternative? Price it at one penny and have every dictionary word snatched up in the next 5 minutes? Heck, at that price I could afford to buy the entire OED in domain names. Imagine what someone (or some company) with actual MONEY could do. If anything, it would reduce availability to most people because everything would be taken.
And besides, who's to say it's overpriced? People are willing to pay it -- and lots of people, including poor grad students -- therefore it's hard to argue that it's overpriced. The demand is there.
How much does it cost Cingular to have a customer? Certainly more than it would cost someone to register a domain; but the more I use my phone the more I pay Cingular. (I have a pay-as-you-go plan.) Does it cost them 10 cents more if I talk to someone 3 minutes instead of 2 minutes? Maybe they should be charging me 1/10 penny per minute instead of 10 cents.
My point is that it's far above cost for them, but so what? That isn't a bad thing, and it's not like it's priced so high that it's at ALL a hardship if you want one.
Try typing Lexus-Financial.com into Google...
Apart from getting the two results that link back to this specific story, at the bottom, on big letters, you get Did you mean to search for: Lexus-Financial.com
This is just straight MS bashing for no reason - chances are that if you typo'd, you'd probably be looking for the suggested alternate. If you typed the same stuff into Google and spelt it correctly, chances are your first link would be a sponsored one at the top.
I mean, if a search engine helps you fidn what your looking for, it's doing its job. if it makes money while it's doing it, so what?
Good! I hope Microsoft keeps this up.
Firefox searches for you while Microsoft dumps you on an advertisement. Which do you think the consumer appreciates more?
This is short term cash for long term losses.
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
...not nearly as bad as what Verisign did. The reason Sitefinder was dangerous is because it has the potential to break things. If an internet-based program relies on a valid server not found error it will break if it gets a ad page redirect. Granted, that would be unusual, but that's not the point. It's been that way since day one. If it's not broken...
Don't you mean: TyPwned
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
I'm a Charter customer/victim, and the first thing I did upon discovering the new "feature" was disable it. Of course, it's not that easy. Disabling Charter's site-finder bullshit just replaces it with Microsoft's site-finder bullshit, because that's Internet Explorer's default, and apparently they thought that nobody would notice. I notice because I'm using Safari on a Mac, and Windows Live search sure as hell isn't the default behavior for me. "Disable" is supposed to mean "stop doing that", not "do it differently and pretend you've stopped."
k tards
The way I see it, if they want to intercept any of my failed DNS queries, they can have them. All of them:
sudo ping -f charter.please.stop.breaking.the.internet.you.coc
Don't become a regular here -- you will become retarded.
Well, CUSTOMERS would know the difference, consumer sheep probably wont know any better. Is this a surprise that M$ profits from the ignorant?
Cheers
* Carthago Delenda Est *
As I recall, Microsoft was already doing this back when Verisign put SiteFinder in place. Maybe it wasn't loaded with ads at the time, but they were redirecting unresolvable domains to MSN search or something. It was widely held up as the right way to do it -- in the one application for which it was, well, applicable -- rather than SiteFinder's wrong way, which changed the response for every single network application, including those that relied on the previous specified behavior.
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.
You, sir, need to enroll in basic economics, stat.
Or at least search the net for the words "supply" and "demand."
"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" No, No. Firefox will ony get you there if you enter the (usually) correct name, otherwise it does not land you on a "google" or "mozilla" page with ppc ads. One one side you have a service which is useful and Spam, on the other side you have just a useful service.
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!?
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.
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.
Funny, if I replace that "M$" with Google re Firefox, it seems to fit the same mould.
Diddums for them. The authors are typo-squatters. You'll forgive me if I really couldn't give a fuck if they're angry. Guess who else decries and profits from typo-squatting? Google.
Like when my Firefox start page went from mozilla.com to google.com, you mean?
You can be as sure as you like. Don't make it true, though, twitter. Fnnily enough, you can even update the entire Windows OS without losing browser defaults. FUD.
Your sockpuppet account is about the only account that carries less credibility in this place than your 'real' account, twitter.
Funny, if I replace that "M$" 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.
I don't know where you get your info but my default installations of Firefox never bring up Google.....
DRM? No thanks, I'll just get it somewhere else...
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".
Whatever you've been smoking, stop. You don't have enough brain cells left to kill.
For a site about things like basic rights, Slashdot users sure do like to censor "dissent".
I'm not a mod but I wish I was. This is exactly the point I want to make. If you change the default search you go somewhere else. In IE 7 this is fairly easy (choose "Find other search providers" from the drop down next to the search box) and google and a number of other search engines are available to be set as the default search engine with only a couple clicks.
"You can now flame me, I am full of love,"
I call FUD!
> SiteFinder broke DNS for the purpose of making money.
Broke DNS? You're kidding, right? DNS works exactly how it is supposed to. The application simply handles NXDOMAIN responses from DNS how they want to. You can disable the behavior. This may be another reason to not use IE, but it is not even in the same league as what Verisign did - which changed how DNS worked.
Oh, I don't bother with that -- I just use Firefox instead.
Incidentally, that still doesn't match the functionality of Firefox, since you lose the ability to search from the address bar. The only way to really fix it would be to not have a URL for the error "page."
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
I noticed the author of the linked-to article did not extend his logic to bad host names within a registered domain. I presume MS's LiveSearch intercepts those as well; so doesn't his original logic, which he talked himself out of, apply (trademark theft)?
.COM and .NET.
Verisign's Sitefinder didn't intercept bad host names within registered domains; only unknown TLD's in
Charter's DNS hack always returns an A record regardless of upstream MXDOMAIN failures.
Open DNS -- well, one word and one acronym. Maybe just a URL. http://www.opendns.com/
The problem with quotes on the internet, is that nobody bothers to check their veracity. -- Abraham Lincoln
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.
Think about it. You've mistyped a search term in your browser window. What now? Would you rather be given a relevant suggestion or a generic error? I'd want my mom to be given a suggestion, to be honest. What IE (and firefox) do in this case is the right thing- they take the user to a (useful) search page instead of an (accurate, but useless as far as the user is concerned) error page.
This is a genuinely useful feature they got right- it's open, configurable, free to be set by OEMs as well as users, and the majority point to google.
The bottom line here is that Microsoft has zero obligation to forego profit for doing something actually useful, so long as users (and ad-buyers) are free to take their search and advertising business elsewhere. Which they are. To their credit, MS did not yield to the (probably-tempting) urge to control which search engine you're pointed to by default.
If you do some testing, you'll notice that this redirect only occurs when you don't specify the protocol (e.g., http:/// https:/// ftp:// etc) which means you're already asking IE to search with an ambiguous query, rather than simply telling it explicitly to resolve an unambiguous address. If you do the former, you get that accurate-but-useless 'cannot find the site' error page.
Also note: more IE users' default search engine is google than is live. OEMs (think: Dell) ship IE with Google as the default search provider. Microsoft, let's face it, does not dictate terms the way they did 10 years ago.
It's not bad when firefox redirects a mistyped URL to a relevant ad-funded search on your default search engine, it's not bad when IE redirects a mistyped search URL to a relevant ad-funded search on your default search engine. It's just not a bad thing, any way you slice it. Nobody's forcing you to accept the defaults, the defaults aren't stacked the way they once were anyhow, and even if you end up at one of these search pages, nobody's forcing you to click an ad. There is absolutely zero lack of choice here.
If there's one thing I won't stand for, it's intolerance.
Hey, back in my day, domain names cost $100 to register! You durn kids don't know when you've got it made!
Seriously. Network Solutions used to have a monopoly. You had to spend ~$100 to get a domain name. When I picked up my first domain name, it had dropped to $35/year, but you had to order two years to start, making it effectively $70. Now, everyone and his brother is a domain registrar, and you can pick up a domain name for $9.99 easily. Often less if you find the right deal.
Compared to what the domain name system was like in 1999, what we have today is a free market.
As was explained before, when we were all worked up about the SiteFinder itself, the mere existence of a DNS record can be a decisive factor in a number of applications.
For example, an anti-spam filter can lookup the domain of the (alleged) sender to weed out some spams. Servers using SiteFinder's "DNS" would then validate bogus domains, because SiteFinder never said "NXDOMAIN"...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
I have to agree with the parent. More than likely, people appreciate Microsoft's "help".
The real losers here are the domain squatters like pool.com
- I voted for Nintendo and against Bush
I thought Rush, the musicians, were fat tards! I could be out of touch though, when I bought "Never mind the Bollocks" it burnt all my elf-rock albums...
need a free COBOL editor for Windows?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I'm an earthlink customer and when I mistype something it sends me to an eartlink page that suggests one or two site URL's one of which is almost always the right one. The page itself has no ads on it.
That said, you're assuming that they're also running a mail server on the same machine as the webserver. [...] I'm pretty sure your mail would bounce if no connection can be made to port 25.
Yes, but usually only after the relay server has spent a week trying it, in case the server has a temporary problem that's going to be fixed.
Oh, I don't bother with that -- I just use Firefox instead.
Incidentally, that still doesn't match the functionality of Firefox, since you lose the ability to search from the address bar. The only way to really fix it would be to not have a URL for the error "page."
In IE7 there is a search bar right next to the addressbar. But that said, I don't bother with searching from either, I just goto google and type in my search. Same on Firefox.
(BTW: I use firefox as well)
Do you Gentoo!?
.. those shady domain-squatters are now finding their flawed business model of profiteering from other's work has been broken by the advent of new technology.
Should we expect another flood of lawsuits to browser users..........?
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Judges and senates have been bought for gold; Esteem and love were never to be sold.
Google pays for the searches via the search bar. I'm not convinced they pay for the ones coming from the location bar. Last I checked, the two did different searches, and one of them didn't advertise itself as coming from Firefox.
Showing a pageful of ads is not a service.
When did that feature get coded? Was it when Google agreed to pay Mozilla all sorts of money for toolbar searches?
Good analogy, but one problem: no one has ever heard of you. People have heard of Microsoft.
Would you kindly mod me +1 insightful?
I challenge you to name TWO Acts of Terror, for which Israel (not pre-Israel Zionists of 60 years ago) is responsible. FYI, "terrorism" is defined as: terrorism, act of terrorism, terrorist act -- (the calculated use of violence (or threat of violence) against civilians in order to attain goals that are political or religious or ideological in nature; this is done through intimidation or coercion or instilling fear)
You are equating the sides, which is a sign of a very short attention span... They are not equal, and — however elitist it sounds — Israel is far better. Inhumanely so...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.