The wider question -- should google.ac.nz even exist? Well, it obviously does. And there's no policy that prohibits it; if
On 21/07/11 16:16, Jim Cheetham wrote: there was, it would have to cover Facebook, TradeMe, Ebay,Yahoo, Bing, and every other "popular" site, with all the policy ugliness that would entail (what's a "popular site"?). The simple fact is that typing "google" and having it work due to browser searches is a convenience; it's never been guaranteed to work. If Google wanted that to work, they needed to buy up domain names for all the possible cases ... It's not a universal feature either. Firefox, on Linux doesn't appear to search any domain other than the domains listed in the resolver search path, i.e. it would look up google.site.ac.nz (assuming the domain is site.ac.nz), but not google.ac.nz. What you describe is a bit like the behaviour described (and proscribed) in RFC 1535, although I suspect that it doesn't do it if there's a '.' in the name, which deals with the specific case described in that RFC. If it does, then it's vulnerable to that issue. Your CNAME solution seems to be a reasonable approach if this is causing you problems. Google's web servers happily perform a redirect to www.google.co.nz or www.google.com as appropriate if they get traffic requesting a domain they don't recognise. Of course it may not work so well for other domains, depending on how those domains' web servers are set up. -- don