URL oddity

WillJ

Coolness Connoisseur
Joined
Aug 9, 2002
Messages
9,471
Location
USA
How come when I type in "www.willj.com" it sends me to Google?

I actually discovered this a while ago, when I was really bored and I wanted to see what would happen if I typed in willj.com. Upon seeing Google come up I was utterly confused, and slightly amused. I even made it my "homepage" for CFC (go ahead and click the www thing at my profile), but since then I've forgotten to make a thread about it, until now.

I know that some websites own more than one domain name, usually variants of the spelling so that people have a greater chance of finding it (i.e., flower.com also being located at flowers.com --- not sure if that's true; just an example). But that certainly doesn't explain why Google can also be reached by willj.com.

Thoughts? For reference: http://www.willj.com

Edit: Note that the title of the page is "Hello." :hmm:
 
The domain is actually registered, to someone in Atlanta. I presume the htaccess must be set to redirect visitors away to google.

edit: i think the source code for the page just calls google.com in a frame
So it does, that's very strange. :hmm:
 
I actually checked your profile once and clicked on the link and got little confused...
 
zurichuk said:
i think the source code for the page just calls google.com in a frame
I'm not very computer literate, so... What exactly does that mean? How did you (and how can I) find that out?
Ankka said:
I actually checked your profile once and clicked on the link and got little confused...
Hehe, did you think I owned Google? :D
 
WillJ said:
I'm not very computer literate, so... What exactly does that mean? How did you (and how can I) find that out?
Hehe, did you think I owned Google? :D

Open "http://www.willj.com/" in your browser, and from the menu (or right-click on the edge of the page), select Edit / View Source / similar options in your browser.

You'll see this:


<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Frameset//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/frameset.dtd">
<html>
<head>
<title>Hello</title>
<META NAME="Keywords" CONTENT="Hello">
<META NAME="Description" CONTENT="">

</head>
<frameset frameborder="0" framespacing="0" border="0" rows="100%,*">
<frame name="TOPFRAME" src="http://www.google.com" noresize>
<noframes>
<body>
<h1>Hello</h1>
<br>
Hello<br>
<br>
Click here to enter <a href="http://www.google.com">http://www.google.com</a>
<hr>

</body>
</noframes>
</frameset>
</html>


Which is a frame to show Google, with frame support or not.
 
The person could be reserving the website and plans to use it in the future...
 
Nice trick, WillJ! ;) I like how when you do a search it keeps the Hello page title.

Wow, check out www.munzy.net! <- Another website in a user's name! Oh, yeah, I registered that. :D
 
XIII said:
Or it could be WillJ just trying for an excuse to spam more... :ack: :joke:
Aaargh, you've figured me out!

;) So this is just because some guy in Atlanta---probably someone not affiliated with Google in any way---bought the domain name willj.com and made it show a frame of the Google website?

Well, that's... odd. I mean, it's not like Google needs any help. (Then again, stranger things have been done: see something.com and purple.com.) And Dell, I doubt he's just reserving the domain, since it's been like this for almost a year now (I think).
 
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