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Looks like Verisign has found another way to profit from a government granted monopoly on .com and .net

Now they\'re serving Inktomi and Overture results when someone types in an expired or nonexistent domain name!

http://www.webadvantage.net/tip_arc...tip_id=273&&a=1

Verisign says that it handles over 20 million incorrect queries each day. Put a price tag on these mistakes, and that�s a petty penny earned for for a government granted service. What this will be leading to, may be a war over these nonexistent domain names between Verisign, AOL, Microsoft, and other Internet Service Providers and hosting companies.

According to a statement released by Verisign, �Verisign�s Site finder service improves the user web browsing experience when the user has submitted a query for a nonexistent second-level domain name in the .com and .net top level domains. ...(Previously) his or her Web browser returned an error message that contained no useful information.�

Verisign has not disclosed the revenue that it will earn from the search engine and paid for advertising search queries than result in this service. Although VeriSign gets unspecified revenues from search engine partners whose technology powers Site Finder, company officials described the service as primarily a navigation tool to help lost Internet users.

AOL is doing the same thing. Up until a few days ago, I had domain wild card enabled on my site. If someone typed in foo.websavvy.cc (even though it doesn\'t exist) they\'d still get websavvy.cc ... I have disabled wild card now due to another issue with someone linking to a sub-domain on my site that no longer exists, which resulted in dup content (in a sense).

But, now if you type in foo.websavvy.cc you should get a 404 page on websavvy.cc that says that sub-domain doesn\'t exist. AOL is now serving up their own \"page\" with AOL ads & crap as the 404.

I can see if it\'s a typo and it\'s a domain not owned by someone. However, if it IS a domain that IS owned by someone, they have no right to do that!!!

quote:VeriSign spokesman Brian O\'Shaughnessy said he could not comment on the lawsuit because the company had not seen it and does not as a matter of policy comment on pending litigation.


He defended the company\'s new service, saying it was helping people find Web sites instead of sending them down a digital \"dead end.\"


\"Twenty million times a day on our network, people mistype domains and don\'t get what they\'re looking for,\" he said. \"Web navigation can be improved with services like SiteFinder.\"
That shows the mentality and mindset of Verisign real well. They are crooks.

This \"stealing\" to make a profit will NOT be for long.

There\'s a great quote in today\'s Lockergnome Tech Specialist newsletter about the Verisign firestorm:

quote:\"Imagine if phone company randomly connected you to a telemarketer if you dialed a disconnected number or... \'We\'re sorry. The number you dialed has been disconnected. For only 99 cents we will connect you to one of the numbers that we think you might have dialed. Press * when you hear the number you thought you dialed.\'\"

I actually got 1 of these pages the other day. Totally useless, and most importantly they didn\'t give enough information about how you got the page. IMO they are siphoning traffic off of people who paid to register the domain the people were actually looking for. It seems ICANN may put the kibosh on this BS! Overture is supplying the results as I understand it.