how can some websites “trap” the user to their homepages when pressing the back button, but others take you right back to the search page.
In: Technology
They do this sometimes intentionally, but usually accidently or as an accepted consequence of the way they handle links into their site.
For example, if I run some ads I want to know what ads people are clicking on so I make a landing page that does nothing more than record what ad was clicked on (known at the time of the click and transition between ad-page and landing page (or site), but lost after that) and then redirect the user to the home-page. That means that when the user then clicks on the “back button” they are brought back to a page that did nothing more than redirect them to the homepage. So…if the page one-back from where you are redirects you to where you are, then…the back button doesn’t work very well :).
There are ways a friendly developer would prevent this.
There’s an html element called a redirect; essentially if you make a page that immediately redirects you, your back button history will look like this, in descending order from most to least recent
* Current Site
* Site that redirects to Current Site
So if you *just* hit back, it takes you to the redirect site.
The trick is to double-click back so that it takes you back to Google through the redirect site, or in a more general sense, right click the back button and click google out of there.
Now, if you chain redirects in certain ways you can make it almost impossible to *just* click back. Some browsers have a built in “too many redirects” feature that will stop the browser after a certain number of redirects, but often they don’t cover all the ways a redirect can occur, and the feature is most useful if you’re working on your own site on the server-level, trying to get a redirect for a legitimate purpose, and not getting infinitely-recursive redirection due to an oopsie.
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