Silly Browser Trick: V for Firefox

A colleague just found this by chance: If you type “v” in the browser location on firefox and hit enter you’ll end up on the V for Vendetta homepage. Incidently I just bought the DVD and loved the movie to bits. But how does it work?

Easy: First of all your Firefox must be set up to use Google.com as the default search engine. If that is the case, any entry that cannot resolve to a real server goes through Google.com and the first result is displayed - much like hitting the “I feel lucky” button.
As someone paid enough to make V for Vendetta the first result for ‘v’, this is what happens.

3 Responses to “Silly Browser Trick: V for Firefox”

  1. rg Says:

    Thanks for the explanation. Interesting to see the top ranking pages for the other letters of the alphabet.

  2. Nadine Says:

    I get the alistapart.com website for A, that’s neat.

  3. JohnM Says:

    Those single-letter (or number) queries are also highly geotargeted. It’s fun to try “3″ from different locations (US vs UK, US vs Japan).

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