So, a few days ago I noticed this new, irksome thing was happening--when I typed an incomplete address into the address bar of my Mac's browsers (e.g. typing bedbathandbeyond rather than www.bedbathandbeyond.com), instead of just going to the site, I would get to some weirdo Verizon search page. Grr. Annoying. The Windows machines on my network weren't doing this, nor was my iBook, just my freshly-loaded-with-Leopard (aka OS 10.5, aka Apple I loooooove you) Mac Mini.
Evidently, Leopard is very accommodating; instead of using whatever the iBook uses to seek out the correct destination of incomplete addresses, it instead goes to the search page that Verizon helpfully offers as, no doubt they would claim, some service to add value.
Well, hell with that, that's annoying. Apparently, also, they do this to like all FiOS users, which happens to be how I found the solution--
- Go to System Preferences
- Click Network
- Click Built-in Ethernet (or, duh, Airport if that's what you use to connect, or both, whatever)
- Click Advanced
- Click the DNS tab
- Note the greyed-out entries that end in .12; I had two of them
- Click the + button and add an entry identical to one of the greyed-out, ending-in-12 entries, except change the .12 to .14
- Repeat for the second greyed-out ending-in-.12 entry, replacing .12 with .14 again
- Click OK, then click Apply, then close the System Preferences window and be happy once again
And there you go, Leopard users (all none of you) who read this blog.