Editing Site Finder (section)

==Site Finder==
All Internet users who accessed any unregistered domains in the .com and .net domain space were redirected to a VeriSign [[web portal]] with information about VeriSign products and links to "partner" sites. This gave VeriSign the advantage of receiving greater revenue from advertising and from users wishing to register these domain names. It had the effect of capturing the [[web traffic]] for several million mistyped or experimental web accesses per day, and meant that VeriSign effectively owned all possible .com and .net domains that had not been bought by others, and could use them as an advertising platform.

VeriSign described the change as an attempt to improve the Web browsing experience for the naive user, without mentioning any use of the domain name system other than by browsers. VeriSign's critics saw this claim as disingenuous. The change led to a dramatic increase in the amount of Internet traffic arriving at verisign.com. According to the web traffic measurement company [[Alexa Internet|Alexa]], in the year prior to the change verisign.com was around the 2,500th most popular website. In the weeks following the change, the site came into the top 20 most popular sites, and reached the top 10 in the aftermath of the change and surrounding controversy.<ref>{{Cite web |url=http://traffic.alexa.com/graph?w=640&h=480&r=4y&u=verisign.com |title=Alexa.com |access-date=2006-11-09 |archive-date=2017-12-01 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20171201035029/http://traffic.alexa.com/graph?w=640&h=480&r=4y&u=verisign.com |url-status=dead }}</ref>