Rogers Is Messing Up My Browser Experience

My internet service is provided by Rogers. They have this annoying "feature" where if you type in a url in the address bar and the site doesn't exist they throw up a Yahoo! search page, passing in whatever you typed.

Why do I find it annoying? Because A) if I wanted to search I would have searched, and B) if I made a simple typo I can't just change it the address bar because now it is the address of their search page. I vaguely remember there was some noise about this a couple of years ago and it went away. Now it is unfortunately back.

Funny thing is they let you turn off the search page, but it still hijacks the address bar anyway - it replaces what I typed with "http://www20.search.rogers.com/not_found" and shows a mimic of the page my browser would have shown you anyway. What possible value does this add? Yeach! Actually it is worse than that because anyone who customized their browser's behaviour on a 404 will find it doesn't work anymore.

Comments

[Leif]

Sorry to be annoying, but: "would have" (twice).

[BBG]

@Leif - thanks for pointing this out. You learn something new everyday!

For future reference, I found this explanation the simplest on why you should use "would have" instead of "would of".

[Erick Dovale]

I am so infuriated by this that, after unsuccessfully asking them not to provide me with the search service, I reported them to the Microsoft anti-piracy department hoping that they at least can make them change the 404 page. In a windows machine this page should look fine but in my mac the images do not show up as the page is referencing the resources inside the IE dll.
This is the single most annoying thing that Rogers has ever done to me; even more that the sporadic outages.

[Osh]

+1 for single most annoying Rogers behavior.

Even after opting out I find the service resets itself to hijack mode after a while.

It's all about money, of course. Those ad clicks bring in dollars.

[th2tran]

Have you tried Google Public DNS?