Virgin Media Advanced Search

Virgin media have recently started redirecting missing DNS queries to their own search page. So, if you go to an address that doesn't exist, like http://www.bad.pleaseremoveyourfeet.com/ (a non-existant subdomain of a friend's site), you get redirected to a search page like http://advancedsearch.virginmedia.com/subscribers/assist?url=www.bad.pleaseremoveyourfeet.com. On the one hand this breaks the expected behaviour of DNS, while on the other hand this is much better than Verisign's Site Finder as a) only Virgin Media's customers are affected, b) they seem to be applying actual intelligence to this system and c) you can opt out of it in a way that actually works

So, on the whole I don't mind this. It would have been good if they'd given some notice of this (though I recall a Register article from a while back talking about this for their cable customers), but this is far superior to Verisign's attempt to take control of the internet, and for non-tech-savvy users it's probably ideal.

( Technical ramblings )