I’ve never been that big on Netscape 3.0 but it does support HTTP 1.1 unlike say, IBM’s web browser, or so many old legacy things from the Windows 3.1/Win32s era.  So without thinking about it, I configured my OS/2 4.0 VM with the DNS server 8.8.8.8…

“The requested URL / was not found on this server”.. What the hell?

And no matter where I tried to go, this is what I got.  I don’t know what on earth it’s trying to do, but it’s certainly trying to pass me through google.  Is it some forceful way to see who’s using their services?  I know at some point they had some ‘browser acceleration’ feature that was a great way to get around corporate firewalls… But it’s long gone.

I’m not sure what was going on but I fixed it by simply changing my DNS to something like 4.2.2.4 and away it worked.

I know it’s largely useless, but if you wonder why older HTTP 1.0 stuff doesn’t work, and you are using Google’s public DNS scheme it could be this…. Or not. I don’t know.