I'm not sure if this is just sporadic or if IE has changed this permanantly, but as of last week if you type the name of a site in the URL bar with no www. or .com it would bring you right to the website. Ex. If I type Yahoo in IE, it would automatically go to http://www.yahoo.com. So if you have a nice domain with keywords in it such as the one in my sig " http://www.clevelandohiomortgage.com ", you get blind hits. When someone typed "cleveland ohio mortgage" as they would in an SE only in IE, it would automatically load my site. Now it seems IE is redirecting to an ask.com search. Looks like they need more money....
Funny thing - I tried this with two combinations: dreamtime properties - opens that domain directly dreamtime properties ltd - opens the google search results
do you own both of those domains? you got google? i got ask.com every time i tried it. This kinda stinks, I hope is not permanent. I didnt get that much blind traffic, but 30 hits a day is 30 hits a day from blind traffic.
I tried them both and they went to ask.com. I am wondering if this is a permanent thing for IE or maybe microsoft just needs some more money. They do not own ask.com do they? There are a lot of keyword rich domain owners that have adsense on a bunch of sites that will be not be too happy...lol.
Update: Looks like IE decided to stick it out with ask.com search for blind hits. Another crappy move by Microsoft. They are probably just pissed most webmasters switched to Mozilla so they figured they would milk it while they still can. Mozilla is still working the way it should.