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.

Question

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

Answer 1

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

* Google

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.