John1An acquaintance of mine, John Barker, alerted me to something strange about his 5 month old Dell Inspiron 9300 laptop. When he types in a non-www web address in his IE6 web browser’s address field, he is forwarded to a Dell search results page populated with pay-per-click ads.

John2For example, http://www.fireplace-outdoors.com takes him to his site (as seen by clicking the top thumbnail to your right), while typing in fireplace-outdoors.com takes him to the Dell page you can see by clicking the lower thumbnail.

In my web browser, (3 of them - IE6, Firefox and Opera) both versions of the url above take me to John’s site.

At least 3 other people who use Dell laptops have confirmed this exact situation.

First of all, modern browsers are more forgiving with different versions of URL’s than the legacy browsers were. With those if you didn’t type the URL including the http://www you ended up with an error page. This has a lot to do with how web servers and the DNS system used to be set up too. The version # for John’s IE browser is 6.0.2900 running on Windows XPSP2. That’s NOT an old browser.

But why, in this day and age, would Dell be redirecting people away from sites, just because they may have omitted the www from the URL they are trying to reach?

The simple answer is, they have configured the IE6 browser to redirect traffic away from people’s sites based on what version of the URL is typed into the surfers web browser.

I can see it if there were a mistake made when typing the URL. Redirecting to their site instead of showing the IE error page would simply be taking advantage of the error. No problem. But no error has occured! On almost any other computer, both versions of a URL work. People are brought to the site they want to go to.

In my opinion, this is stealing. It’s blatently stealing traffic from site owners that they then monitize for themselves.

While others may not give a hoot one way or the other about this, I will NOT buy a Dell computer because of this. Ever, in fact, this is the last post I will make on this or any of my sites mentioning the name Dell.

I’m also interested in hearing from other Dell computer users about this. Please leave a comment below letting me know if the browser on your computer takes you to Dell’s site when you use the non-www version of a url.

Filed under: General