Is Dell Stealing Your Traffic And Cashing In On Non-WWW Urls?

February 10, 2006 | In: General

An 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.

For 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.

10 Responses to Is Dell Stealing Your Traffic And Cashing In On Non-WWW Urls?

brian

February 11th, 2006 at 6:21 pm

This is just a customization built into the registry. It is defined as your default search engine. Early versions of IE had this built in and you could search by typing GO in the browsers Address Bar. Now it is a ? . So Dell is just sending people to their own, probably very basic, search engine with probably tons of ads and tracking cookies.
The Solution: http://www.itworld.com/App/255/IWD010423oplivingston/
Or just do a search for “Default Search Engine” IE
with quotes

Paul Short

February 19th, 2006 at 10:27 pm

Hi Brian, I understand what you’re saying, but when people want to go to a site by typing in the url, they want to go to that site whether they type the url with the www or not. They don’t want to go to DELL’s page of PPC links. DELL has the browser set to redirect, while other configs of the same browser on other computers don’t.

J Moore

March 11th, 2006 at 9:23 am

I’ve got the same problem with my new Inspiron E1705. There is a page that says this behavior can be stopped by going into the Control Panel and using Add/Remove Programs to remove either “Browser Address Error Redirector” or “GoogleAFE”. Well, there’s no program by either name in Add/Remove. I use Firefox or Opera almost exclusively anyway, but sites like my bank demand IE6. PITA.

“…it’s all Good.” » Blog Archive » Yahoo Ya-where?

March 11th, 2006 at 6:36 pm

[...] So next, I Googled the B.A.E.R. phrase and found a good match at Gadgetizer. Yes, that described the problem pretty well, although at that page the problem happened when the “www” was left off a typed-in URL, and mine was labeled “Sorry, we couldn’t find http://view.atdmt.com……”; and I believe that was caused by the custom HOSTS file. [...]

Dell user

March 12th, 2006 at 2:54 pm

i have a dell dimension running XP Home and SP2 , and any site i type without the www goes directly to the page intended …

so while this pc is fairly old ( considering the fast-paced upgrading that is usual ) it still runs high-end media with ease , and has been updgraded several times .

OthersDoItToo

March 17th, 2006 at 9:21 pm

I used to have a Juno account and every error referred me to a JUNO search page. When I got a new computer, it seems Dell does it. There has to be a way to conquer this. When I get an errror in a URL, I want a plain old ERROR page! I have had pages that are not really errors turn into errors and then force me to look at stupid “search results” just because some ad on the page was not working. I hate the Browser Address Error Redirector feature!

Lin Ennis

April 3rd, 2006 at 11:03 am

This is so irritating! I noticed it a few months ago, too, but can’t remember which new cxomputer it was. I bought an Acer in June and an HP Media Center in November. Particulaly when going to my own sites, like solarhomesite.com, I type in just the s-o-l-a-r-h-o-m-e-s-i-t-e-.-c-o-m. I was landing on what appeared to be a search page containing variations on those words–and LOTS of ads! I don’t tolerate that kind of control so I overcame it, probably using a method like those described above.

In a similar vein, Brian, I’d be interested in what you have to say about typing a search term in, landing on a web site that has the exact phrase and several closely related phrases on it, which make one think EUREKA, then clicking the links to see nothing happen…one doesn’t even land in Topeka. What’s with that?

tbone

April 13th, 2006 at 9:23 am

There is one piece of software that needs to be removed in addition to the Google stuff – it’s called “URL Assistant”.

Once you do that you should no longer be hijacked.

What a bunch of BS – I paid for this?

Ryan

June 9th, 2006 at 6:23 pm

I think Dell/Google fixed this so that it does not work this same way anymore. But, they are hiding the hyperlinks of their advertizers so that they are not displayed in the status bar when you hover your mouse over them! Nice trick, but I don’t think it’s real ethical. Especially since they should know that computer security people try to teach people to look at their status bar to see where a hyperlink is actually sending them.