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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
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.
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.
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.
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
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?
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
Don't you mean: TyPwned
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
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.
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. ... 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.
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.
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 complained to Charter (I was in a pissy mood that day) and politely asked them to either give me the IP of an alternative charter DNS server that did not perform this crap, or to tell me what data they where retaining, how was my privacy protected, how would data be used... I had an alternative DNS server address before the end of the day :)