In the last few years, there’s been an annoying trend that when I mistype an address, I get redirected to a search page asking me if THIS (inevitably wrong) page is what I meant. If not, would I like to use their super-spechul search engine to search for what I wanted? (Bing, I’m looking at you but you’re not the only one)
This isn’t a life-or-death issue, but it is a minor annoyance.
There’s gotta be a way (host file?) to just bring up an error so I can retype the address without waiting to be redirected. I don’t want to ever be redirected. If I want to search, I can go to a search page. Any ideas?
There is a setting in your browser for automatically searching from the address bar. Since you didn’t tell us which browser you use, I can’t tell you the exact steps to go through to turn it off. But it’s in your browser settings.
Even that is not foolproof. Many many evil companies buy up domain names which are likely typos of real domains. e.g. www.micorsoft.com. And they then put their “helpful” link farm or fake search engine there, hoping to redirect your traffic to one of their subscribing advertisers.
It sounds like your problem is more the former than the latter, but the latter is still out there to trip you up. And there’s no cure for that except never making a typo.
If the ISP/DNS provider is doing the redirect, it may be difficult to fix. According to the RFC, a DNS request for an invalid domain should fail. However, some DNS providers return an ip address that resolves to their search page. OpenDNS does this - it is the price of a free service. Some ISPs and DNS registrars do this, too, to make money from advertising.
The problem is that this breaks correct behaviour. One US ISP/DNS provider started doing this, and was forced to back down due to the breakage inherent in such a system.
For example, if you are using IE 8, tools -> Internet Options -> “Advanced” tab will show you an option for “Search from the address bar”, which seems to be on by default (I normally use firefox, myself). I just tried this with “giibson.com” - by default, it searched. When I turned it off, it told me “Internet explorer could not display the webpage” with a link to open up some more mostly less than informative information (another reason to use firefox - why they can’t specifically say “Cannot find server at …” like happens on firefox, I don’t know).
Note that failure within the browser won’t give you a “404 error page”. That is generally a “resource not found” error thrown back by the website at the other end, possibly because you mistyped another part of the URL following the (legitimate) domain. You haven’t got control over how they handle errors.
I have 1and1 as my webhost. 1and1 automatically defaults to a “search engine” it provides if you get a 404 error. But you simply go into your domain settings and change it to the generic “that page does not exist.” You also have the option of creating your own page for 404 errors.
You can also set up your website so that it never returns a 404 error. All pages will redirect on 301 to a search engine or home page or whatever, if they don’t exist.
It’s really about how the website owner wants it set up.
There’s a big difference between hitting a page that doesn’t exist at a domain that does exist (what the last 3 posts are going on about) and trying to reach a domain that doesn’t exist at all (what I think the OP is talking about).
When you look for a page on an existing site that doesn’t exist, that response is indeed up to the site’s owners. But if you’re looking for a domain that doesn’t exist, it’s up to your ISP or your browser to decide how to respond.