Why does typing "ass" in an address window take me to the Democrats blog?

November 28, 2005 6:45 PM

Address Bar-filter. How is it that typing just "ass" into my browser's address window resolves to the Democratic Party's blog... [more inside]

while "ass.com" is an aggregation of anal sex links? Are the dems both profiting from sex links and redirecting potentially interested blog readers, or is ass.com unrelated to just plain "ass"? (And hey, I was just trying to get to my Amazon Associates account info and hit return prematurely, honest.)

posted by Scram to computers & internet (10 comments total)

because it's the result of a google "i'm feeling lucky" search for "ass."
posted by rxrfrx at 6:47 PM on November 28, 2005

rxrfrx is right. Type "failure" in there.
posted by interrobang at 6:48 PM on November 28, 2005

Probably an unexpected sideeffect of Google's ranking algorithms. The title for the blog in question is "DNC: Kicking Ass". I assume that, combined with overall link popularity to the site, has floated it to the top for "ass" as a search term.
posted by planetthoughtful at 6:50 PM on November 28, 2005

Firefox uses Google's "I'm Feeling Lucky" when you type a phrase into the location bar. Kicking Ass is the first result for ass on google. Sorry, no conspiracy.

I won't ask why you typed 'ass' into the search bar. On preview: what everyone said.
posted by ALongDecember at 6:51 PM on November 28, 2005

Ohhh I see... sorry Scram, missed the last bit of your explanation.
posted by ALongDecember at 6:58 PM on November 28, 2005

(And hey, I was just trying to get to my Amazon Associates account info and hit return prematurely, honest.)

That happens to me all the time.
posted by rebirtha at 7:33 PM on November 28, 2005

If you want to turn off this keyword-matching behavior, type about:config into the location bar, hit enter, then go to keyword.enabled and toggle that to 'false.' Warning: that will turn off the Google end of it, not the feature that appends a .com to any random word you type in, such as 'ass' or, I don't know 'cucumber' or 'monastery'.

If you want to turn off domain guessing too (where the browser takes any random word and prepends www. and appends .com to see if it works, it's about:config --> browser.fixup.alternate.enabled & then toggle to 'false.' Then you too can get delightful error messages like "ass could not be found. Please check the name and try again."
posted by Tuwa at 7:59 PM on November 28, 2005

The most logical reason is that there is a strong relationship, or correlation, between both keywords.
posted by orlin at 8:22 PM on November 28, 2005

Not surprising to me, considering that the symbol of the Democratic Party is the donkey (aka "ass"):


posted by cali at 9:58 PM on November 28, 2005

If you use the address bar a lot, you'd probably like YubNub
posted by Sharcho at 10:23 AM on November 29, 2005