It seems that Google doesn’t want to play by anyone’s rules but its own.
This will probably come back to bite them.
In their latest “innovative” move they’re now taking control of the humble 404 error page.
If you have their “helper” toolbar installed you may not get to see the web as it truly is.
Charming, isn’t it?
And of course Matt Cutts is defending them like a good little Google employee.
Call me a cynic, but doesn’t that remind anyone of Network Solutions’ defensive stance of front running?
Erm, Internet Explorer – the browser the toolbar is most used in – /already/ hi-jacks the same 404s by default, and Google’s response sure seems a lot more useful.
The big netsol problem was that they were breaking the DNS protocol – all of a sudden there was an infinite space of valid DNS responses, breaking many MTA sender verification tests in the process and resulting in many a typoed e-mail not bouncing.
The whole point of response codes is for just this reason – to allow software to interpret and handle the error. Far from mis-representing the internet, this is how HTTP was designed, this is completely valid behaviour for a HTTP client.
No doubt the feature is driven by economic self-interest, it will drive more searches to Google than to MSN live, but it’s some stretch to call this evil – they’re breaking nothing afaics. Anyone who /really/ wants control of their 404 *long* ago had to work around the IE behaviour, and same workarounds apply here.
Colm
I would have to disagree.
The technically savvy will know how to work around these kind of things, but the average user probably won’t.
IF Google were to clearly inform people of what the new “feature” did it would be one thing, but that doesn’t seem to fit with their policy. We deal with a lot of non-technical users who don’t know how to use a browser properly under normal circumstances. If a toolbar that they think is going to help them starts to serve content like this it may lead to even more confusion.
Netsol didn’t break DNS. They registered the domains to themselves.
I don’t see how that can be interpreted as breaking DNS. The domains _were_ registered. That they may not have had “valid” dns entries is another debate entirely.
Thanks for your input
Michele
Google really is going to take over the world! Not impressed with that read!
OpenDNS do something similar to this. If you use their service and try to connect to a non-existent domain, you’ll be redirected to the OpenDNS site showing the results of a web search for the domain name, along with several sponsored results.
It may not be as bad as hijacking 404 errors, and there may be some that find it useful, but personally I prefer to let my browser provide me with the error message.
I appreciate that the toolbar won’t replace the 404 if the original 404 page is over 512 bytes. Most well designed sites, including blog systems will handle the 404 and show a custom error message that will be well over the 512 byte limit. ahem 🙂
I think it’s a useful addition to the toolbar too.
Simple solution. Don’t use the Google Toolbar. Its not like they force you to.
Oh christ now I’ll get more annoying phone calls from my mother asking me about this. Damn you g**gle!!!!!
That’s insane, consider If I accidentally left a broken link to a file, and when user clicks the link he will be redirected to Google Page ? That’s insane. Some one Stop Google!!! , Microsoft is the only player that have the ability to beat this giant, which is in actual taking over the world!