not only this, if webservers can treat both versions as the same, and if in fact the specification treats them as the same, then so should search engines. if there is a problem, then the search engines are at fault. it seems ridiculous that i have to configure a webserver to add a redirect in order to avoid this. actually i think this is something that could also be fixed in the browser. i just checked, firefox treats them as separate domains. i don't think it should.

in practice of course this is not a problem because nobody really puts a trailing dot on hostnames.