How to disable Microsoft hostname lookup "enhancements"?
Recently, I found if I enter a single word query "blah" into a browser (Firefox or Safari) on my home Windows machine (not connected to domain) then search is redirected to Bing, instead of my default search engine Google.
I've suspected that it is not problem of the browser, but rather hostname resolving "feature". So, I've tried
> ping blah
and it outputs
... blah.mshome.net [207.46.31.61] ...
Whois on the IP said:
OrgName: Microsoft Corp
OrgID: MSFT
Address: One Microsoft Way
City: Redmond
StateProv: WA
PostalCode: 98052
Country: US
NetRange: 207.46.0.0 - 207.46.255.255
When I checked the communication between the browser using Wireshark, I've got following:
Request to 207.46.31.61:
GET / HTTP/1.1
Host: blah
...
Response:
HTTP/1.1 302 Found
Cache-Control: private
Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8
Location: http://www.bing.com/search?q=blah&form=MSSRPD
Server: Microsoft-IIS/7.0
X-AspNet-Version: 2.0.50727
X-Powered-By: ASP.NET
Date: Fri, 25 Jun 2010 23:20:03 GMT
Content-Length: 166
<html><head><title>Object moved</title></head><body>
<h2>Object moved to <a href="http://www.bing.com/search?q=blah&form=MSSRPD">here</a>.</h2>
</body></html>
This is quite annoying. It seems to me, that Microsoft tries hard to force user to use Bing (e.g. recent issue with Bing toolbar).
Could anyone help?
I found the answer: In case you have the same problem, go to registry: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\TCPIP\Parameters and empty the mshome.net value from the ICSDomain key, then disable and re-enable your network adapter.
UPDATE: After few days, it stopped working again. I've found that IPv6 DNS is also redirecting to Bing. I don't know, where Windows get the IPv6 DNS since my DHCP server is not providing that and I have not set up that. So, I've disabled IPv6 for now and it works.