Gizmoojo!

Ever clicked on a link and it brings you to www.microsoft.com even though you knew the url was something else? It happened to me pretty much few times per week because the link was malformed – meaning the url for the href was "http://http://www.something.com" rather than "http://www.something.com". Curious as a dog, I decided to find out why the heck this is so.

A quick googling led me to the ANSWER TO THE MYSTERY! and it appears that this only happens if you are using firefox. Apparently, for the search term http, microsoft.com is right at the top of the search results and so when firefox gets a malformed url, it redirects you to the first return result of the word/s in the url and so there you go, you ended at www.microsoft.com out of the blue.

Isn't this a perfect irony – you get redirected to www.microsoft.com for no reason because the url was malformed and the best part, its all in part of the great work from the most known rivals of Microsoft – Firefox and Google.