As regular readers of the Sciencebase blog and sibling publication Sciencetext.com will know, I'm interested in the underyling mechanisms of the internet and more specifically the web. It therefore always strikes me as odd, although it shouldn't be surprising, to not find a site that I hoped to find at a specific web address.
The first thing that occurs to me when I see a page not found error for a standard type URL, is why didn't the organisation grab and 301 redirect said URL to their actual website. For instance, why doesn't the UK government organisation DVLA grab www.dvla.co.uk and redirect it to the proper spot on the web for dealing with a taxdisc. After all, thousands of Brits search for www.dvla.co.uk as if it were a keyword and are then disappointed not to find the information they were looking for.
Similarly, why would home improvement company B&Q, whose site is at www.diy.com (clever only to Brits, I assume as Americans prefer the term home improvements) not register www.b-q.co.uk and variations on that theme and redirect to their main site in order to capture the obvious audience that will be searching for them using that kind of URL rather than simply putting B&Q into Google as a keyword. It's a common problem and one that any good webmaster can exploit to their advantage by providing a port of call that will rank well in the search engine results pages and provide links to the actual site the visitor will be after. So, if you tried to get to the B&Q website using www.b-q.co.uk or something similar then you're probably after www.diy.com instead. B&Q spends a fortune buying an ad at the top of the Google SERPs it could save itself so much money by simply grabbing the obvious company URL and doing a spot of SEO on it.