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You can meet all standards (http's 404 error) and still have links on the error page.

It sounds like Comcast is redirecting to a search page instead of returning NXDOMAIN for non-existing domain names. That is certainly not possible do to and at the same time be standards-compliant.

That's what they're doing, though only if the domain matches /^www\..+/ which (along with their allowing you to opt-out) makes it a few degrees less evil than Verisign's infamous "Site Finder".

No you do it on the browser level. Crome for example when you mistype a domain gives you a 404 page combined with a google search.

Isn’t that different? You already want to go to some Google page. Google’s result pages are also fast, so it’s not as though you would have to wait any longer.

Silent redirects are not so nice, but if you can see why you were redirected it shouldn’t be a problem.

You might be interested in opting out of this Comcast DNS redirection nonsense:

https://dns-opt-out.comcast.net/

Best set of hoops I ever jumped through (well, with regards to Comcast, at least).