Is this a new traffic tactic?

miscoded url leads to storefront

[royalelephant]

I was updating a website today and miscoded an internal URL. Instead of /place/place/file.htm I put in //place/place/file.htm

I uploaded it to my "live" site and clicked it. Instead of any sort of error message from my browser or server. I got a real live Japanese web storefront that is very much related to the /place/place/ that was in my internal file name.

When I hover on the internal URl, the taskbar reads [place...] and that somehow gets to a Japanese language affiliate/spammy storefront.

Can someone explain this to me? How would this happen? Is this indicative of something ary with my browser, my host ISP, spyware?

[mford]

It could be spyware but it could also be your web host, doesn't sound very healthy.

[royalelephant]

hmm... I don't know if you noticed, but I made my example link in my first post "live" with the http, and if you click on it you wind up at the history place! How does that happen?

[jonrichd]

I think that the "Auto Search" function in your browser is trying to figure out where to go. Search for 'place' in Google, and you'll get to the same location that the link above gets you to.

[PatrickDeese]

Could it be your ISP.

Mine here in Mexico has a webserver configured and I can actually get parts of the site by typing in URLs like index.html

[encyclo]

You browser is sending to you to the "I'm feeling lucky" URL which comes up for the search query on the broken URL. Probably not spyware, I assume you have Google as your default search?

[royalelephant]

hmm... I'm not sure how to tell that google is my browser's default search engine. I'm using Firefox 1.0 and I do have the google plug-in installed. I gather if it's not showing for everyone that it is the lucky button.

[Sanenet]

Go to Google, type in that faux URI, and click the "I'm feeling lucky" button. If you go to that site, then probably thats whats probably happening.

Personally, I'm a bit sceptic, and when I do the above I get a site about history for us students.

Could be spyware, or could be a problem on your local machine. If you paste the URI into your browser address bar, what do you get?

[encyclo]

I'm using Firefox 1.0

In Firefox, this is standard behaviour, Google toolbar or not. You can change your preferred search engine in the Preferences.

Don't forget that the default home page for Firefox is supplied by Google, and Google search is well integrated into the browser.

[royalelephant]

You can change your preferred search engine in the Preferences.

I looked for it, but only found "options" and a dialog for that wasn't there. I assume you mean "about:config" in the addy bar? (I'll live with this behaviour rather than mess with these settings for now.) thanks for easing my mind.

:)