Most people should have seen this by now, but since it made news somewhere I thought I would add it here :)
Sept. 5 — The Web"s once common "page not found" errors are themselves going missing, stripped from recent versions of Microsoft"s Internet Explorer in favor of a search tool provided by—you guessed it—Microsoft.
THE SOFTWARE BEHEMOTH quietly introduced the change two weeks ago, updating Internet Explorer"s autosearch function to launch whenever someone types a misspelled or nonexistent domain name into the browser"s address bar.
Now an MSN Search page appears by default, rather than one of several standard error pages, including error 404.
For example, a search for "https://www.microsoft.con" might draw a page suggesting alternate spellings or Web links for the mis-typed address, as well as direct Internet Explorer users to MSN Search.