Names have not been changed, since no one is innocent.

I just had the strangest, funniest computer problem ever that both seems like an old practical joke I would play AND reminds me how shitty IE is. But I digress.

One of the patrons at the library comes up to me and asks why his computer can’t access Yahoo. Whenever he enters http://www.yahoo.com into the address bar, it takes him to our search page. I’ve never see anything like this before. I’ve had to deal with tons of spyware that redirects people, that’s a given, but why would one be doing it to our catalog search engine? I start with the basics. Every other page works. Going to Yahoo by typing in http://www.yahoo.com or just yahoo.com works. It’s only when you do http://www.yahoo.com by itself that the error occurs.

Reboot, just in case. No change.

Next I double check all the internet settings, although I don’t know of any that could be causing a problem like this. Everything checks out perfectly, or at least as well as you would expect for a public internet computer.

So, I do a virus scan and run Ad-Aware, cleaning off a few data trackers in the process. But there’s no change in the computer’s behavior towards Yahoo. This is starting to annoy me, since I’m trying to work on other things at the same time I’m doing this, which is dragging the trial and error process out to over an hour so far, when you add in the time it takes those old creaky things to search their hard drives.

I think about it a bit more. I really haven’t ever seen anything like this. Finally, about to give up, I go behind the circulation desk and complain about the problem to Samantha and Valerie. Samantha mentions something off hand about how it will sometimes search for things if you type in stuff in the address bar. I know that that isn’t causing it, because in an effort to stop the problem earlier I had turned off address bar searches. Also, there’s no way any search engine would return our catalog as the top result for Yahoo. But it got me thinking. Suddenly it hit me, I knew what it was doing.

I ran and checked the bookmarks. Right there was one with the title http://www.yahoo.com. I deleted it. Instantly, the computer starts going to Yahoo again. IE automatically goes to any bookmark whose title you plug in to the address bar, so that if you type in “The Jux Entente”, and that’s the title of your bookmark, that’s all you need to do. The yahoo.com bookmark was pointing to, you guessed it, our catalog. I would like to think that whoever did this did it as a deliberate prank, but I know that’s not what happened. Someone clicked “add to favorites”, somehow, and then thought that was an address bar. I’ve seen stranger things.

What bothers me the most? I used to do easy, annoying little computer pranks like that all the time. Maybe it’s because I’ve never used IE, but I’m mad that I never figured that trick out. Damn me.

You can bet I’ll remember it, though 😉