I just came across OpenDNS, another service like Verisign’s SiteFinder that is using DNS-related error messages as a means to deliver their content. I think that commercializing error messages is a really bad idea. It might work very well for them as a company, who knows, I am not speculating on that. But that’s their business model, when you type in non-existent domain names, you are redirected to a page with ads. That will put an unhealthy pressure on something that should only be about clear communication.

Also, I think that things that automatically correct errors often cause more problems than they solve. A good example is HTML parsers from before XHTML 1.0. Basically, instead of giving errors when they encountered bad HTML, they attempted to guess the intentions and render that. That led to lots of pages that were unmaintainable because they were so obstuse and buggy. Then many pages wouldn’t run on small devices like phones, etc. because it takes to much CPU power to do all that error correcting.

If you look now at HTML, XHTML is definitely what people are using, which is actually quite strict. And instead of testing web pages on every single browser and version that people could think of, companies are now spending that effort on making full featured sites. All these AJAX sites are the perfect example, like Google Maps, etc.

And lastly, as Paul Vixie, one of the main authors of DNS software, pointed out, what’s the difference between typosquatting (i.e. googl.com going to a site with random ads) and this service? It’s really the same thing when you think about it.