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Help needed on programming a proxy server

Posted: Sun Jan 15, 2006 10:14 pm
by wils
Hi,

Has anyone done any work on converting invalid url (typed by web browser user) into keywords for a PPC search?

Just wondering whether it is possible to do it on the server side, rather than on the client side like those currently done by Yahoo and Microsoft.

Thanks in Advance,

Wilson

Posted: Sun Jan 15, 2006 10:35 pm
by feyd
they are usually done using the 404 handling tools. In Apache environments, this would be done via mod_rewrite, most often (slightly different than 404 handling.) Most web servers allow you to specify a custom 404 handler script these days...

Posted: Mon Jan 16, 2006 12:45 am
by wils
Hi feyd, Thanks for your help.
Can the Apache server be used as a proxy server to clients accessing the web?
Apart from Apache, is it possible to code an IIS module which handles the 404 error?
Thanks again.

Posted: Mon Jan 16, 2006 10:18 pm
by wils
This is a more detail description to what I need to do.

The scenario is this:
A user on his/her web browser typed an url, browser send url to DNS to check and found it to be invalid, and the web browser display a error page to the user.

Instead of the above process flow, is it possible that we could intercept the invalid result from the DNS server, send user typed url as keywords to a search engine, and display the search results to this user?

At the moment we have a javascript which could send keywords to Yahoo, and Yahoo returns a xml file to us and then we customize our own search page.
This is so that we could return it to the user's web browser.

Best Regards,

Wilson

Posted: Mon Jan 16, 2006 11:05 pm
by timvw
wils wrote: Instead of the above process flow, is it possible that we could intercept the invalid result from the DNS server, send user typed url as keywords to a search engine, and display the search results to this user?
If i'm not mistaken Versign did it as following (and they didn't become exactly popular for doing so):
All requests that can't be resolved on the dns server (regularly) or resolved to an ip where a webserver runs.
That webserver than look at the posted/requested data and displays search results, ads, whatever...

As already mentionned, you can also get control over "not-working" links (http status reply != 2xx) by using mod_proxy.