"funny" URL redirections

[Christopher Browne]

On 5/26/05, Lennart Sorensen <lsorense-1wCw9BSqJbv44Nm34jS7GywD8/FfD2ys at public.gmane.org> wrote:
> On Thu, May 26, 2005 at 01:57:38PM -0400, Taavi Burns wrote:
> > But it's not, as this happens when using Firefox on Linux.  :(  It's
> > more likely that Microsoft has spammed the DNS servers somehow.
> > (exactly how I haven't yet been able to figure out...)
> 
> Opera turns word into word.com first, so http becomes www.http.com,
> while firefox appears to do some other order of trying suffixes and
> prefixes.  So microsoft owns http.something where something is what
> firefox tries to add, but apparently is not what opera tries to add (or
> at least not in the same order.)

Lynx does much the same; it tries appending ".com" to URLs that are
way too short.
 
> > It's not http.com, http.net, or http.org.  Typing those in manually
> > provides different websites, not Microsoft.
> 
> Yeah, I wonder which it is.  .net, .org and .com don't seem to be it.

Then the answer is likely that it's not as simple as adding a suffix.

If you go to Google.com and enter "http", you'll find that the top 10 sites are:

#1 Microsoft
#2 AltaVista
#3 Yahoo!
#4 W3C
#5 Amazon
#6 CNN
#7 Lycos
#8 My Excite
#9 Adobe
#10 MapQuest

I think that's more likely the reason for http to get you to Microsoft.com...
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