Going to your chosen search engine when you type wrong URL

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scott-cam
Posts: 35
Joined: February 7th, 2008, 3:31 pm
Location: Nottingham

Going to your chosen search engine when you type wrong URL

Post by scott-cam »

It used to be that when I typed in an incorrect URL, one that doesn't exist, Google (or whichever was my chosen search engine) would appear with search results based on that incorrect URL.

But these days I get an 'Unable to find website' page from my ISP, which is Virgin UK. This page is useless and never has any useful search results. (I'm not talking about just typing in a few words, and then pressing return. Google does come up for that. I mean typing in a whole URL, but one that doesn't exist anywhere on the web, like twitter.comz).

Is there a way to set Sea Monkey so Google appears again when I make this mistake? Or is this Virgin taking things into their own hands and there's nothing I can do about it?
isaacschemm
Posts: 270
Joined: January 20th, 2015, 12:29 pm

Re: Going to your chosen search engine when you type wrong U

Post by isaacschemm »

You might be able to manually set your computer to use a different DNS server (not Virgin's) and see if this stops happening.

Here's a list:
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=public+dns+se ... &ia=answer
I've used Google's before with success.
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raj_bhaskar
Posts: 1946
Joined: November 7th, 2002, 3:50 am
Location: Glasgow, Scotland
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Re: Going to your chosen search engine when you type wrong U

Post by raj_bhaskar »

Yeah, Virgin has a bad habit of 'hijacking' your DNS (see http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/08/17 ... a_opendns/).

You should be able to disable it at: https://my.virginmedia.com/advancederrorsearch/settings.
scott-cam
Posts: 35
Joined: February 7th, 2008, 3:31 pm
Location: Nottingham

Re: Going to your chosen search engine when you type wrong U

Post by scott-cam »

Thanks for that. I have disabled it.

I had previously tried to disable it by clicking on a link that said would enable me to disable this service, but it only ever took me to a 'Can't find the page you're looking for' message.

However, now I'm just getting the old standard 'Address not found' page. How do I get a Google search to appear instead? Was I ever able to do this, or was I imagining it? (On Internet Explorer a Google search comes up if I type a non-existent URL.)
barbaz
Posts: 1504
Joined: October 1st, 2014, 3:25 pm

Re: Going to your chosen search engine when you type wrong U

Post by barbaz »

You were never able to do this if what you typed looks like a valid domain. AFAIK you're always able to do it otherwise.

BTW, NoRedirect is another way to stop some types of DNS hijacking.
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therube
Posts: 21703
Joined: March 10th, 2004, 9:59 pm
Location: Maryland USA

Re: Going to your chosen search engine when you type wrong U

Post by therube »

Mozilla is coming up with a fix for that, New Test Pilot Program - No More 404s Powered.
Fire 750, bring back 250.
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.1; en-US; rv:1.9.1.19) Gecko/20110420 SeaMonkey/2.0.14 Pinball CopyURL+ FetchTextURL FlashGot NoScript
Anonymosity
Posts: 8779
Joined: May 7th, 2007, 12:07 pm

Re: Going to your chosen search engine when you type wrong U

Post by Anonymosity »

But the proper response to an incorrect URL that does not exist is to give an error message. That is how the Internet was set up to work.
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