Netscape Communicator

How Netscape does keywords

November 25, 1998


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

Changing Keyword Servers in Mac Communicator 4.5

November 25, 1998

Editor's Note: This is probably not kosher with Netscape's Liscense.

If somebody has good info on how to do this on windows please let me know

How to Change Keyword Servers in Netscape Communicator 4.5

Do this with a copy of Netscape Communicator 4.5. Work only on a copy whenever you're working with resedit.

  1. Launch Resedit
  2. Open a copy of Netscape Communicator with Resedit
  3. Double click on the "Text"
  4. Select the item called "3010" "allprefs" but don't open it
  5. Copy it (command-C)
  6. Switch to BBEdit
  7. Paste (command-V)
  8. Edit the preference line which says pref("network.search.url",    "http://keyword.netscape.com/"); -- It's near the top.
  9. See the notes about what this does.
  10. Select ALL
    NOTE: Make sure there isn't a blank line at the end of the file. If there is you may have problems with prefs which will likely show up right away as color preference problems.
  11. Copy it (command-C)
  12. Switch back to Resedit
  13. Paste (command-V) into the "Text" table you left open
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