Google hijacking 404 error pages | Hacker News Reader

Google hijacking 404 error pages

seoker.com

19 pointshollywoodcole19 comments

I don't know what it is with people thinking they have a right to control my web experience. From people demanding they be able to show you advertisements (or else you're 'stealing') to this chap demanding that he get to show you his 404. A "right" to control what I see as a result of a status code? It's mind boggling. What my application choses to do with the status codes your server return is my business, not yours.

IE 7 does the same thing. A few months ago we had to set up a special 404 page for a broken link that was accidentally emailed out to hundreds of people. It was simple, the 404 page would check to see if the requested url was the bad link sent via email, if it was, it would redirect to the appropriate page. If not, we'd show a 404 page.

Worked great in FF but totally broke in IE7. Why? Because the 404 page size was under 1Kb, IE7 decided that our 404 page wasn't informative enough and supplied it's own.

The solution, as stupid as it sounds was to add enough white space to the file until it was larger than 1Kb.

And, you know, also stop sending broken links out.

303 or 307 redirection had to be used in the first place, I think.

301 no? It's a bad url after all...

Yeah, you're both right. This was a quick and dirty because people were starting to open emails. We ended up fixing it for real after our quick and dirty solution. The only reason I mentioned it to begin with was to point out that IE7 hijacks 404 pages too.

Is this for all 404 pages? If you have a custom 404 page does Google still take over? I certainly don't mind Google removing the plain old 404 default pages (or even better the pages with got 404 trying to locate the 404 page).

I don't use Google Toolbar, but I found a link explaining that you can disable this feature:

http://www.google.com/support/toolbar/bin/answer.py?hl=en...

Anyway, if you're having this issue, you probably agreed on this behavior when you accepted their license :-).

Exactly. This is something a user of Google Toolbar might have cause to gripe about (assuming they weren't told in advance), but not someone who owns a website with 404s that get redirected.

However, for people who like to put sensitive user data in GET variables (coughMonstercough), this is yet another reason why they shouldn't do that.

Where it becomes a problem for people who own a website is when this behavior causes additional support calls due to a more informative 404 page being masked.

It will likely result in incidences where support staff have a checklist of "do you have the Google Toolbar installed? Uninstall it first." However, I don't imagine there will be a ton of cases like this.

I do think it is a mistake that the Google Toolbar enables this by default. Taking this power away from the website owners is not good. And let's be honest, At least 50% of people who have the toolbar installed are not technically savvy and a good portion of them probably didn't even intend to install the software (it was bundled with another download, etc).

Also, I don't see a problem with the practice of putting sensitive data in GET variables if the website is protected by SSL - Am I missing something? Edit: Thanks for the reply aaco, those are both valid reasons and I appreciate the insight.

"At least 50% of people who have the toolbar installed are not technically savvy and a good portion of them probably didn't even intend to install the software (it was bundled with another download, etc)" - If you think this can't be possible, then you don't talk to enough normal people!

The thing that makes me say that a lot of people don't even realize this software is installed is due to two main scenarios:

1. When downloading other software, I have seen several instances where the Google toolbar is bundled, and you have to go into an advanced menu to de-select it. 2. Many OEMs are now shipping computers to people with the Google Toolbar installed.

I believe these two cases account for a large number of the installs. Possibly even greater than the number of users who intentionally go out and download it, but more likely in the 30% range of new installs.

Of course, I have no real numbers on this, and so it is pretty much a guess.

"Also, I don't see a problem with the practice of putting sensitive data in GET variables if the website is protected by SSL - Am I missing something?"

GET requests are logged by the web server and in the browser history in plain text, even for SSL requests.

Therefore any server administrator or computer user can have access to those information just reading the server log or the browser history.

Nothing new... I wrote up Charter Communications about a year ago for doing the same thing... I guess its no better (or worse) when Google does it... Must admit.. it pissed me off the first time I got the Charter/Yahoo page when entering a search command in my address bar... used to be the case that with Firefox you could enter a term in and the displayed page was the "I'm feeling lucky" Google result... after this hi-jacking started that functionality went out the window... shame.. I liked it... I am guessing since Charter is already hi-jacking my 404s, the Google jacking won't affect me anyways :)

Here is my original write up of the creeps... http://blog.eznet.frih.net/?p=62

Here is Charters hi-jack http://www11.charter.net/search?qo=asdasd.asd&rn=3RjeJZ7...

If it's because of the Google toolbar, what features does it have that can't be replicated with Firefox plugins? Why do people insist on installing the Google toolbar, or any other toolbar for that matter? Browsers are slow enough!

The StumbleUpon toolbar is pretty sweet . . . just rate sites as you go along and then your Stumbles will be like opening presents.

Didn't know they used collaborative filtering, I thought they just used it to rank sites. If you are right they might be worth investigating.

I'm pretty sure they do.

Here's the post that convinced me to try it out: http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/blog/2007/12/28/12-filtering...

WTF is wrong with StumbleUpon?

Google (Yahoo, MSN, etc) ask people to and offer a benefit that is already provided by a decent browser (blocks popups! persistent search box!) and since many users simply take the defaults and do as they're told, voila! Millions of users!

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