Sneak is indebted to reader Ben Goldsworthy, who helpfully pointed out what was happening behind the scenes in Sneak's Firefox browser, which somewhat surprisingly shuffled off to Microsoft.com in response to a broken link. "Thankfully there don't appear to be any moles in the Mozilla camp. When Firefox can't resolve a URL it assumes the text is a search query and searches Google for the entered address, in your case 'http'. The top result on Google.com for http is www.microsoft.com, so that's where you end up." This explanation does make a lot of sense, although it also begs the question of why Microsoft should be so closely associated with a protocol that it didn't invent and certainly doesn't own, despite Internet Explorer's ubiquity. Sneak for one will point now to a proper destination for queries about http, and encourages everyone else to do likewise, to bomb a little sense back into Google's index.

30 Jul 2004