Forum Moderators: open
MSN did it with their browser so what's the difference? They after all have over 90% of the browser market so in a sense, it was more net wide with MSN because it didn't matter what the domain extension was and still works for non .com and .net sites.
The only real problem with this is the spam filters and such. They now can not tell bogus .com or .net domains.
ICANN needs to shore up their agreements to make sure they don't allow this type of thing at that level.
I've got mixed feelings about it at the moment; loosing traffic to competitors will affect some people; but others (me included) are benefiting from sitefinder quite nicely.
They're not so much misspellings of my domains; they all seem to be misspellings of words concatenated with my domains, so for example; if I own somedomain.com; i'm getting a referral from sitefinder when somebody tries to go to foosomedomain.com, and they're misspelling "foo".
I was able to find 3 or 4 days ago but as soon as this all became big news, but cannot get the page up for love nor money now (what a shame).
Great idea it must be said and I am sure Overture were licking their lips at those clickthroughs... not any more.
TW;)
my ISP (nildram) has IP blocked or firewalled the Verisign search page
That's too bad, you're missing out on some extra traffic. I've been getting about a dozen hits daily from sitefinder since this started. I don't like the ethics (or lack of) but hits are hits!
Yep follow that one - however I do have a problem with as I see it a control of .com .net reg and management that then simply mops up other traffic because someone happens to mistype!
I wouldn't have a problem with them if they didn;t have this control over the domain issue!
The company (IMHO) are not great to deal with as I originally (in my foolish early days) registered a number of domains and the hassles of getting them transferred away to another provider are legendary.
4 emails within 48 hours to confirm I wanted to transfer, having to send text only replies etc etc etc meant that it took 5 attempts and 5 months to finally transfer 1 doamin.
I would love the traffic don't get me wrong, but for just a few hits I rather seem them banned from ISPs!
Just my opinion.
Cheers
TW;)
[edited by: TinkyWinky at 10:16 am (utc) on Sep. 25, 2003]
We are seeing a steady flow of referals from sitefinder not only from the mispellings but also from added words that are not registered. eg. fishingregional.com.
If given a choice from this system or the old MS system we prefer this one. I don't think we are losing any traffic and we are certainly gaining visitors.
Basically Google will index sites even if they are excluded by robots.txt. It will just not have any info on that site, but enough "referrals" from trustworthy site will get the site ranked anyway.
A possible good side effect is that sites which previously stopped working are now turning into redirects to the sitefinder. This might make it a bit harder for domain speculators who buy ranked expired domains.
The sitefinder should go away though, it broke very many things. The Internet is not just the web.
The Internet is not just the web.
That is right. What happens for example with fake or mistyped domain emails?
Will they all go to verisign?
Will they bounce "from" verisign?
The company [VeriSign]... are not great to deal with...
I couldn't agree more TinkyWinky. Without bashing them, I will say that I am never comfortable with the way they balance the interests of their customers with their own.
What happens for example with fake or mistyped domain emails?Will they all go to verisign?
Yes they will for unpatched servers. When a server experiences problems where the domain doesn't resolve I think any emails sent during the downtime does too. Usually, most ISPs put undeliverable mail into a queue and then retry again over a period of time like three days. With sitefinder, I think it probably breaks this system too.
How can a mis-spelling NOT affect Google?
User types in domain name but spells it wrong and gets the Verisign search. So they think the page is down and do a Verisign search instead of re-typing the name or going to Google to do a search.
Didn't even consider the email side - that could create all sorts of spam to do with "buy this domain", sign up for this Verisign that Verisign product etc... Great!?"!
However if every wrong email went to Verisign - I say set up a nice little programme to poll millions of fake emails and they'll all crash the Verisign servers - so no problem!
TW ;)
1) What Verisign has done effects ALL aspects of the internet, not just websites.
2) Verisign is is likely tracking email with this. They setup a new sitefinder 'mail rejector' recently.
$ telnet somecrappydomain.com 25
Trying 64.94.110.11...
Connected to somecrappydomain.com.
Escape character is '^]'.
220 sitefinder.verisign.com VeriSign mail rejector (Postfix)
They then happily accept your 'mail from' and 'rcpt to' before dropping the connection.
are you sure about that? recent messages in other threads on this site point to it being a very dumb rejector... dumb as in you can not send anything and you always get the same sequences of responses no matter what you send...
[time passes]
:( i just spent about 10 minutes searching WW from google and cannot locate the thread with the info in it... i can't get the words down right... more than 4 or 5 and i seem to get no pages found or because of the forum's messageing speed, the links far outpace the googlebot and thus the indexes point to articles that aren't even close :(
i'm sure it was here... may have been slashdot, though... <sigh>
Additionally, when the query redirects to Verisign, their site .verisign.com and .2o7.net both try to set a cookie in your browser. verisign must have planted a cookie on several hundred million computers in the last week or so. I wonder what they will do with that data.
Google is directly affected by this redirect
Sorry, of course they are affected; what I meant by saying that it wouldn't bother search engines was more that they will have exceptions set-up.
SE bots will attempt to resolve said broken link (as they have to do with every broken link anyway); receive the result 12.158.80.10 (sitefinder.verisign.com) and ignore it.
