h a l f b a k e r yExpensive, difficult, slightly dangerous, not particularly effective... I'm on a roll.
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This always happens to me. I'm typing in a URL into the address bar... something like www.yahoo.com, but I hit enter before I hit the m, so it searches for www.yahoo.co. After it can't find it (surprise, surprise), it gives me an error page.
Why can't the browser be smart enough to at least TRY
www.yahoo.com? What are the odds of someone wanting just a .co. I realize that there are .co's in the UK, but they are always followed with .uk.
I'm not saying that it should automatically change it to .com (perhaps some people would be interested in visiting Columbian websites), but given the overwhelming popularity of the .com addresses, it could at least try it before giving me an error message.
[Same with .NET... Let people look at Niger websites if they want to, but try to complete the phrase.)
Country Codes
http://www.ics.uci....t/country-codes.txt
List of country codes (including .CO, and .NE) [pnewp, Mar 24 2001]
[link]
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Or ask 'Did you mean www.yahoo.com?'. |
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If it were like a word processor suggesting spellings for misspelled words, giving you closely related website urls that you could click on, that would be pretty cool. |
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My most common typo when entering a url is to leave out
a 'w' in 'www'. Some webmasters already account for
idiots like me, consider ww.google.com for example. |
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What are you talking about, UnaBubba? Nothing in pnewp's idea is specific to the US. Are you under the common misperception that the gTLDs are reserved for the use of US residents? |
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The only TLDs that are US-specific are .mil, .gov and .us. |
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And even if .com was US-specific, how would attempting a correction from .co to .com (after the primary lookup failed) hurt any of you? |
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egnor: Maybe despite people's best intentions many .com sites are commonly focused on America. This is not too noticeable to Americans because they are prone to cultural emmersion. In pwep's idea he suggests www.yahoo.co be exanded to www.yahoo.com but he forgets the www.yahoo.co.uk alternative, which is also valid. The first alternative's content is about America, the second is about the UK. |
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I'm not too bothered about the error page, and I suspect that trying to second guess wht you were really intending to type in would a) not be any quicker than telling you that you got it wrong. Please try again and b) be just as likely to take you to some other site that you weren't interested in (though it could make for quite an interesting evening's surfing). No, what really annoys me is that, having typed in an incorrect URL, it stores the bloody thing in your autocomplete. |
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I know that on Google's Advanced search, you can search just the URL field. I make typographical errors all the time in the URL field and think it would be nice if browsers had an option of initiating a URL search instead of just giving the error page. |
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Aristotle: It's much easier to imagine a typo leaving off a single letter ("m") than a whole suffix (".uk"). Besides, if there are two equally plausible corrections, it could offer a choice -- this is standard autocorrect stuff. And in any case, I really don't see why there's anything in this idea that assumes any US-centric set of domains; ideally, it would adapt itself to the URLs you tend to type, so maybe for a UK resident who had a tendency to hit the Enter key instead of the period, it *would* suggest adding ".uk". |
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Rusty: Lots of browsers will fail over to a specified Web search engine when they can't find the URL you entered. |
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Thank you egnor... I did mention the .uk problem, although this is easily solved by using the Country defined in your Windows environment (for those who use Windows which would be about 80-90% of web browsers... just a guess, but it is a large majority.) |
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The problem with fixing it, as you will see, is as soon as you click into the address bar, it highlights all of the text that is in there, so you have to remember to either click again or hit the right arrow key so that you'll be at the end of the URL. |
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I tried not to make this American-centric, but I will alter the idea to only apply for those in the US (as determined by your computer set-up.) Plus you can always turn URL Typo Correction off in your Preferences... menu. |
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Also agree with Dr Bob... why store these incorrect URLs in your recently used addresses or the autocomplete?? Very annoying. And why isn't there a keyboard shortcut to jump to the autocomplete?? If I'm typing, I don't want to have to stop, then use the mouse, then click on the one I want, wait for a noticable half to full second delay, and then hit the enter key? It seems this could be improved. |
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I was just explaining why UnaBubba might have felt there was a US-specific bias with .com sites and no specific criticism of [pnewp] was intended - his idea simply served as an example of this. Besides people who are familiar with the internet are familiar with this bias - we know US news does not cover the outside world in very much detail, for example. |
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What get me about IE's autocorrect is that it always sorts the choices alphabetically. If I type www.google.co I want *both* .uk and m offered as early alternatives. Currently the first choices are a whole array of .co.uk URLs. |
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In IE, when typing in an address and the autocpmlete come up with suggestions, you need not use your mouse, you need only press the down button to the URL of your choice and hit enter. Netscape physically completes the URL you are typeing yet still allows you to finish typing the URL(in case you didn't notice the completion). You can hit enter at any time and it'll do the rest. And I think (and there may be) there should be a way to edit those entrys stored into the autocopmlete database to get rid of those pesky mistakes which are invariably higher on the alphabetical list and therefore, the first choice that pops up. |
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And does anyone know what percentage of the WWW is US-specific anyway (I'm sure it's high, but it's seems fitting we being so darn groovey and all)? |
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France just has .fr - in the UK the order of URLs used to be reversed in the manner of newsgroups but we changed in favour of standardisation. The two level approach actually ocassionally breaks American software assumptions based on one level addresses - cookie access being the one I can think of at the moment. |
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A bigger problem is that many typo'ed (or wrongly-guessed) url's reach existing sites which are not what the user intended. www.whitehouse.org, for example, is very different from www.whitehouse.gov. And www.websters.com is not the same as www.webster.com. |
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I am guessing if you were to type .co and hit enter that you would really mean to type .com. If you really meant .co.uk, you're missing a few keystrokes there. In any event, perhaps IE (or your alternative browser) could be set to default to one or another which would save us the "server not found" for .co domains. |
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Actually there are a couple of services out there that work very well. URLFixer is a firefox plugin which seamlessly corrects wwww and .cmo. OpenDNS is an alternative network of DNS servers (faster than the general ones apparently). It has a nice side effect of redirecting you to a best-guess if you typed the URL badly. The combination of the two will get you to the right place even if you type wwww.gooogle.cmo |
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