Check this out: weird side effect of Google integration into Firefox
The integration of Google into Firefox, such that entering a keyword
into the URL bar results in an automatic redirection to the first result
returned from Google, has a really ironic side effect: any malformed
link of the form, http://http://www.whatever.com will wind up routing
people to www.microsoft.com (the first search result returned by Google
for “http”).
See http://www.thomasleavitt.org/test.html for an example (click on
News.com) - make sure you’re using Firefox, as it appears to be the only
browser that does this.
I found out about this totally accidentally, when I clicked on a link of
this sort, and was unexpectedly taken to www.microsoft.com. I was like,
“What the hell?” until I noticed the malformed link… then I was like,
“Has Microsoft secretly poisoned the DNS somehow?” (o.k., I’m paranoid)
That seemed not to be the case, as launching Konqueror and typing the
same link in did not produce as similar result (just an error page).
Typing in www.http.com produced an obnoxious pseudo-search site that
flooded me with pop ups (ugh), so clearly Microsoft hadn’t cleverly
registered http.com to take advantage of browsers using automatic URL
completion. That eliminated the most obvious possibilities.
Then I was like, “Has some wiley hacker snuck some innocent seeming code
into Firefox?” … after a bit of thought, I launched Epiphany, which is
based on Mozilla, and was clued in: typing “http” into the URL bar
produced a Google search page (so does clicking a malformed link of the
type above), with Microsoft.com as the first entry. Then it became
obvious what was happening, and that Microsoft had nothing to do with it
(although I’ve got to wonder how/why they are the number one search
result for “http”). Hilariously funny. Microsoft must be receiving an
appreciable amount of random traffic as a result, as this is a very
common “typo”, especially when people are cutting and pasting URLs, or
pasting them into forms that have fields pre-loaded with “http://”.
What’s even funnier is that none of the other browsers I tested behave
this way in their default configuration: not Konqueror, not Epiphany,
not Opera, not Mozilla, not even IE! Just Firefox (tested in 1.0.4 on
Knoppix, and 1.0.6 on Windows)! :)
