Vasco just shared this with me:
- Open Firefox 1.x
- Type in blog to the line where you usually enter the URL
- Type return and wonder
What happens? After a while, Firefox redirects to Blogger.com. Try this with various other words like sport, basketball or computer (I like this one) or world. Your result will vary with the language settings of your browser.
If you compare this with the result list of a google search, you end up with the same top results. So, when typing in a word to the URL entry field of your Firefox, it’s pretty much the same, as if you press on „I feel lucky“ on Google.com for that word.
I don’t feel that comfortable with this feature and reminds me a little of this incident, where the german Firefox was redirecting through an affiliate when using the builtin eBay search: Firefox: eBay-Suche mit Umleitung (german)
When something is meant to be free (as in free speech), I don’t want such things happen without my permission.
Update: Kiesows shows how to deactivate this behaviour: Enter „about:config“, hit enter and search for „keyword“. Rhere you can disable it or change it to a real google search.
maybe i’m wrong, but AFAIK that’s the traditional behaviour of firefox since a long time (read: since i use it ;-)
if you just type a word or sentence in the url field, it performs a „i feel lucky“-search at google. i guess they use google because it seems to be the biggest search engine.
But why do they do it? Everbody (at least everone who is technically interested) is bored by the custom error messages the Internet Explorer is showing, instead of the servers error message. If I mistype an url, I want an error message. That’s it.
if you mistype an url, you get an error message.
but „sport“ or „basketball“ is not an url ;-)
you don’t like it, right? ok, open a new tab, enter „about:config“, hit enter and search for „keyword“. there you can disable it or change it to a real google search.
Right, I don’t like it and I guess the border between a „keyword“ and a mistyped URL is not sharp all the time. Try „lummade“ (as mistyped „lumma.de“) and see what you’re getting…