Google on the trail of the VeriSign sitefinders

Johannes Beus
In 2003, VeriSign, at the time monopolist for many generic top-level-domains, caused a scandal when they redirected queries, for which no domain existed, to their own, advertising-financed langindpage. Now, it seems that someone at Google rummaged through the archives and decided that VeriSigns actions were worthy of imitation. About a year ago Google finalized a deal with the pc-manufacturer Dell. The contract states that that all new Dell-PCs will have Google as default-searchengine as well as the usual Google-software pre-installed. Additionally, a small, inconspicuous program will be installed that redirects every query, for sites that can not be resolved, to a page like this one:


At normal browserresolution, you can only see advertisements, only then will the regular Google-SERPs be shown and at the bottom of the page there are some suggestions for searchqueries with high-priced keywords: loans, refinancing, hotels and so on. If we had not known better and if the Google-logo could not be seen from time to time, we might just be reminded of a spam-landingpage or extremely unpleasant pseudosearchengines. Additionally, Google's creed of “Don't be evil” is lead ad absurdum if, on the one hand, Google is massively supporting a campaign for net-neutrality but undermines core mechanisms like DNS, on the other hand.
Johannes Beus - on Wed (05/23/2007) at 22:47 PM

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