As with many things you happen to discover, they happen by mistake. Today was no different for me and I found it pretty interesting with what happened.
I am using FireFox 3.6.3 as my web browser and I was attempting to use direct navigation to NameBee.com but I must have had a little bit of browser lag during my typing and the only thing that actually entered into the address bar was simply com . No dots, not other letters, simply com .
I also happened to hit my Enter key with simply com in the address bar and a page started loading? I figured I would see the common ISP type landing page but holy smokes, it actually went to a website! Yahoo.com ? Interesting…
com in your address bar in FF 3.6.3 and hitting enter brought me to http://www.yahoo.com/ . After retrying it to duplicate what just happened and it doing the same thing, then made me wonder… there are other TLD’s, I wonder what happens with those and were would I end up?
com brought me to http://www.yahoo.com/
net brought me to http://www.microsoft.com/net/
org brought me to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.org
info brought me to http://info.com/
biz brought me to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.biz
us brought me to http://www.usmagazine.com/
mobi brought me to http://www.google.com/search?ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&sourceid=navclient&gfns=1&q=mobi
me brought me to (apple) https://auth.me.com/authenticate?service=mail&ssoNamespace=primary-me&returnURL=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cubWUuY29tL21haWwv
I stopped testing at this point but I was pretty amazed that each one brought me to a site! I guess this is another new form of typo as I would assume that FireFox has made some kind of an agreement to send that specific traffic to the specific sites? Give it a try once if you are using FireFox and let me know what happens for you.
Steve
Of the 8 ‘typo’ redirects, 5 took me to the same location, and 3 to a different location.
I am using Firefox 3.5.9; and am in Canada. My location may explain a few of the differences – assuming these are ‘paid’ typo redirects, then UsMagazine.com likely would have less interest in paying for Canadians to go to their site (from a ‘us’ typo). And perhaps Yahoo is less interested/concerned with their Canadian market penetration? Just a thought…
~~ Same destination ~~
net
org
info
biz
~~ Different Destination ~~
com
http://www.google.com/search?ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&sourceid=navclient&gfns=1&q=com
(**interestingly, 1st site listed: Yahoo.com)
me
http://www.google.com/search?ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&sourceid=navclient&gfns=1&q=me
(1st site listed: http://www.me.com/)
us
http://www.google.com/search?ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&sourceid=navclient&gfns=1&q=us
(1st site listed: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States)
Steve
Intangible Properties
Notice that if you go to google and search for each of your queries that the first result will be the site you are being sent to.
Your browser just forwards you to the first result on google for the keyword you type into the adderss bar.
Its kind of like “Feeling Lucky”
Jamie Zoch
@intangible properties,
That makes more sense. Nice catch!