Microsoft "SiteFinder" Quietly Raking It In 176
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.
Even if it is from Microsoft... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Even if it is from Microsoft... (Score:3, Interesting)
Absolute fud - Google does the same... (Score:5, Interesting)
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?
Re:Annoying comparisons with Google and Firefox (Score:2, Interesting)
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:/// [http] https:/// [https] ftp:// [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.
Re:MX-records are optional - SiteFinder really evi (Score:3, Interesting)
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"...
Re:It gets worse... (Score:2, Interesting)