Number 251 - April 2004

Avoiding Site Redirection
quoted excerpts from Fred Langa's Langa List Mar 8, 2004 (http://langa.com/newsletter.htm)
Responding to a letter from a Canadian subscriber complaining about being redirected to "equivalent" Canadian sites instead of the US site she entered, Fred commented:    "Some web sites try to "help" you by guessing where you want to go and sending you there, unasked-for. Sometimes, it is a help, but other times, it's a hindrance. This reader had a very specific problem (trying to access US sites from Canada), but the solution can be applied to *any* situation where you want to go to "X," but a site keeps sending you to "Y..."    "The sites are probably noting your IP address; if your ISP is in Canada, the sites assume you want to see the Canadian version.    "But you can get to where you want to go by using an explicit IP for the sites you want to visit, instead of using the sites' names. For example, Ebay.ca is at http://66.135.192.35 while Ebay.com is at http://66.135.192.87.    "Even from Canada, going to http://66.135.192.87 should bring you to Ebay.com (although it's possible you'll then be redirected again, depending on how the page is set up.)    "But how do you find a site's numeric address? The easiest way is to use Ping, a networking tool that's usually on every normal Windows system from Win98 onward; and available in Linux and the Mac OS as well. It's a command-line tool in Windows, so you'll want to open a DOS box or Command window first. then type PING followed by the plain name of the site. Normally, Ping lets you see if you can access a	given location, and how long the raw access takes. But it also shows you the numeric address of any named site you feed it. For example:       "PING microsoft.com       "or       "PING www.microsoft.com (you omit the "http://" because this isn't a web browser access)    "In the above examples, Ping replies with "Pinging microsoft.com [207.46.245.222] with 32 bytes of data..." Those numbers are microsoft.com's IP address. In fact, if you enter it into your browser as http://207.46.245.222, you'll go to the Microsoft.Com home page, just as if you'd typed http://www.microsoft.com.    "You can use Ping to see what the numeric address is for *any* site. For example:       Google.ca: 216.239.59.104       Google.Com: 216.239.37.104       Amazon.Com: 207.171.182.16       Amazon.Ca: 207.171.187.19       Amazon.Co.UK: 207.171.166.19    "If you access the sites via the explicit IP, and then bookmark that url, you should be able to get where you want to go. (Note: numeric IP addresses can and do change from time to time; you might need to do a new Ping every now and then to keep the IP current.)    "Many international sites also have a high-level home page that lets you specify which localized home page you wish. This takes an extra step, but also gets you where you want to go."
Number 251 - April 2004