Hello, I am trying to figure something out that has been on my mind for some time - finally came to write it down. When going to facebook or myspace, I have realized that you can view peoples profiles by typing the profiles name behind the backslash : http:www.myspace.com/southpark. I doubt that myspace has anything association with south park , besides having their information to support their profile; and would not have any south park related pages within their web servers' main directory. Another example of this: www.facebook.com/obama will be direct towards www.facebook.com/BarakObama. Could someone shed some light my way on how this is done?
I can only speculate, but I would guess that they have customized the 404 (page not found) with a server side script that searches a database based on the url typed and returns the most relevant results and then redirects you to that page. If no results are returned from searching the database, then you get shown the page not found message.
that is an interesting idea jwitt98! Thank you! What do other people think? Might there be another way to do this?