Google hijacking 404 error pages

I don't know what it is with people thinking they have a right to control my web experience. From people demanding they be able to show you advertisements (or else you're 'stealing') to this chap demanding that he get to show you his 404. A "right" to control what I see as a result of a status code? It's mind boggling. What my application choses to do with the status codes your server return is my business, not yours.

IE 7 does the same thing. A few months ago we had to set up a special 404 page for a broken link that was accidentally emailed out to hundreds of people. It was simple, the 404 page would check to see if the requested url was the bad link sent via email, if it was, it would redirect to the appropriate page. If not, we'd show a 404 page.<p>Worked great in FF but totally broke in IE7. Why? Because the 404 page size was under 1Kb, IE7 decided that our 404 page wasn't informative enough and supplied it's own.<p>The solution, as stupid as it sounds was to add enough white space to the file until it was larger than 1Kb.<p>And, you know, also stop sending broken links out.

Is this for all 404 pages? If you have a custom 404 page does Google still take over? I certainly don't mind Google removing the plain old 404 default pages (or even better the pages with got 404 trying to locate the 404 page).

I don't use Google Toolbar, but I found a link explaining that you can disable this feature:<p><a href="http://www.google.com/support/toolbar/bin/answer.py?hl=en&#38;answer=75816" rel="nofollow">http://www.google.com/support/toolbar/bin/answer.py?hl=en&#3...</a><p>Anyway, if you're having this issue, you probably agreed on this behavior when you accepted their license :-).

Nothing new... I wrote up Charter Communications about a year ago for doing the same thing... I guess its no better (or worse) when Google does it... Must admit.. it pissed me off the first time I got the Charter/Yahoo page when entering a search command in my address bar... used to be the case that with Firefox you could enter a term in and the displayed page was the "I'm feeling lucky" Google result... after this hi-jacking started that functionality went out the window... shame.. I liked it... I am guessing since Charter is already hi-jacking my 404s, the Google jacking won't affect me anyways :)<p>Here is my original write up of the creeps... <a href="http://blog.eznet.frih.net/?p=62" rel="nofollow">http://blog.eznet.frih.net/?p=62</a><p>Here is Charters hi-jack <a href="http://www11.charter.net/search?qo=asdasd.asd&#38;rn=3RjeJZ7yaDEE6YQ" rel="nofollow">http://www11.charter.net/search?qo=asdasd.asd&#38;rn=3RjeJZ7...</a>

If it's because of the Google toolbar, what features does it have that can't be replicated with Firefox plugins? Why do people insist on installing the Google toolbar, or any other toolbar for that matter? Browsers are slow enough!