Michelle over on Dell’s blog made a quick little post about how Dell is now offering an option to not have them crapify your new PC with all their useless trialware and other crap that various companies pay money to have shoved onto your desktop.

Regarding Google tools, a quick clarification—Google tools that are pre-installed on Dell systems are a bit different from google.com, and can’t be easily compared. Blog posts like this one express concern about the URL Assistant specifically. The purpose of this utility is to handle a mis-typed URL by responding with a webpage of suggested links that contains both sponsored pages (paid placement) and typical search result links, versus returning an error page with no results or guidance. Some folks prefer the suggested information, some don’t. For folks who are interested, click on the Remove the URL Assistant link in this Knowledge Base article for instructions on how to remove it.

Are you bloody kidding me? That’s the biggest load of crap I’ve ever read.

The Dell adware garbage doesn’t give you relevant results; it gives you paid crap, relevant or not, way above the actual search results. Check out this screen cap from the OpenDNS blog. It’s what you see when you connect up to a mistyped domain and you have Dell’s crapware installed.

Notice all the sponsored and irrelevant links at the top of the fold, right there for you to see. Now compare that to what OpenDNS does:

Now let’s ponder that. Michelle claims that some people prefer the suggested information and some don’t. What I don’t get is who does prefer that? Secondly, if Dell’s only motivation is giving customer’s relevant information and not milking a few cents with pay-per-click ads, why not do what OpenDNS does?

Calling that adware “guidance” proves just how deeply out of touch Dell really is.