NASA, NSA, what's the difference?



  • I was trying out the Alexa toolbar for Firefox (I know, I know, that's TRWTF) today, and got the following set of helpful suggestions while browsing APOD:

    At least I hope the reason for the suggestion was just overzealous typo correction...



  • It' s because the NSA knows everything!



  • Where's the WTF?

    If you had typed "Goerge" and it offered you "George" and "Gorge", would you be dumb enough to complain about that?



  • Exactly, it's not like there is some guy that types all the different suggestions for each word, it's just automated.



  • @SilentRunner said:

    Where's the WTF?

    If you had typed "Goerge" and it offered you "George" and "Gorge", would you be dumb enough to complain about that?

     

    While minor, it would have been a sign of greater intelligence if the suggestion had been "nasa.gov", as that was the originally requested domain.



  • @dhromed said:

    @SilentRunner said:

    Where's the WTF?

    If you had typed "Goerge" and it offered you "George" and "Gorge", would you be dumb enough to complain about that?

     

    While minor, it would have been a sign of greater intelligence if the suggestion had been "nasa.gov", as that was the originally requested domain.

    I'm assuming it couldn't find any DNS records for nasa.gov which is why it failed in the first place.



  • @morbiuswilters said:

    @dhromed said:
    While minor, it would have been a sign of greater intelligence if the suggestion had been "nasa.gov", as that was the originally requested domain.
    I'm assuming it couldn't find any DNS records for nasa.gov which is why it failed in the first place.
    That's quite possible.  The weird thing, though, is that it seems to only happen for nasa.gov: trying to load http://nosuchhost.nasa.gov/whatever yields a suggestion to go to http://nsa.gov/ instead, but http://nosuchhost.nxsa.gov/whatever or any other variation I can think of just causes it to suggest http://nosuchhost.nxsa.gov/ exactly as typed.

    Same goes for every other misspelling of a well-known domain name I've tried so far. It's as if they actually have a special piece of code saying "Domain not found under nasa.gov? Try nsa.gov instead?" Which I can't seriously believe could be the case, but if there's any other way to trigger this "feature", I sure haven't found it yet.



  • @vyznev said:

    ...but if there's any other way to trigger this "feature", I sure haven't found it yet.
    Oh, wait, I spoke too soon:




  • @vyznev said:

    Okay, now this really is a WTF now. From the original post, I would have thought that maybe nsa.gov has a higher Alexa ranking than nasa.gov, but this definitely proves it wrong.



  • Actually, it gets even worse.  Going to http://nosuchhost.alexa.com/ gives a message suggesting http://ialexa.com/, which, as far as I can tell, appears to be a Chinese SEO site abusing the Alexa brand.



  •  googel.com appears to just redirect to google.com, so probably has the same page rank and is higher in alphabetical order?



  •  So it appears they have a generic typo corrector, instead of a list of likely domains.



  • @dhromed said:

    So it appears they have a generic typo corrector generator, instead of a list of likely domains.
    There, I fixed that for you.


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