How Netscape does keywords

Nov
25
1998
Tags:


Much has been made of the recent additions to Netscape Communicator 4.5. (For more information on this
see Scripting News. In part this is because of Netscape's control over this process. But it is
easy for the small company or others to change the way it works in your business.


In previous versions of Netscape Navigator or Communicator typing a word such as "scripting" in the "Location" field
would whisk one to www.scripting.com. No longer. Now it takes you to a site of Netscape's (we presume) choosing.i
It does this by using the following URL pattern. http://keyword.netscape.com/keyword/scripting. If a user types
something that is not in Netscape's database it takes you off to a Netscape, Excite search engine.


Whatever the URL what really happens is that all requests to http://keyword.netscape.com/keyword/* return a 302 Error which
is a web server's way of saying a document has "Moved Temporarily" and the new "correct" URL. Here's the output from the scripting URL:

 

 $ telnet keyword.netscape.com 80
 Trying 207.200.75.2...
 Connected to keyword.netscape.com.
 Escape character is '^]'.
 GET /keyword/scripting HTTP/1.0
 

 HTTP/1.1 302 Moved Temporarily
 Server: Netscape-Enterprise/3.5.1C
 Date: Wed, 29 Jul 1998 22:13:14 GMT
 Content-type: cgisearch
 Location: http://excite.netscape.com/directory/computing_and_internet/programming
 Connection: close
 

 <HTML><HEAD><TITLE>Moved Temporarily</TITLE></HEAD><BODY><H1>Moved Temporarily</
 H1>

 This document has moved to a new <a href="URL UNKNOWN">location</a>. Please upda
 te your documents and hotlists accordingly.</BODY></HTML>Connection closed by fo
 reign host.


Using this information you could create a similar directory on your own server (call it keyword) and redirect your own
traffic to your own keywords. For example see: Changing Keyword Servers in Mac Communicator 4.5.


Other ways


It should be possible to simply do this with a Meta_Refresh directive in regular document headders.


This should work on Windows as well, but it has not been tested.


Try typing a bad domain name (http://www.oinw.com) in Communicator 4.5 (you have to type it not click on it). You'll end up at http://home.netscape.com/netcenter/nodns.html?www.oinw.com
This also funcitons via the keyword server. If you type a non-existant domain you get a message back but you are first sent to
http://keyword.netscape.com/dnshelp/www.oinw.com. This could function as a handy internal help guide.



Other things to change



Mac users may want to change their memory cache. There has been a debate on MacFixIt about this.


When you're editing the text file do a search for "related" and you'll begin to see how the "What's Related" feature works.


I guess you could (if you have your own Name Servers) change the IP address for keyword.netscape.com locally and redirect it to one of your machines.
I wonder if any ISP's will do this to "help" their customers?

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