I used to have no trouble connecting to the router UI (on wired connmection) by putting 192.168.0.1 into my browser's search line (on Chrome), but recently that just got me redirected to a Netgear Webpage. Following online advice, I cleared browsing history, but that didn't help. I knew the IP address hadn't changed - "ipconfig" assured me it was still 192.168.0.1. Only after deleting all search engines but Google (you cannot delete that from Chrome), then clearing browsing histoey again, I was then able to connect to the router UI interface and check configurations.
Question: How do I prevent recurrence of this without limiting my choice of search engines? Has anyone else seen this issue? Is it a particular search engine? I plan to add them back one at a time to try to find out. Unfortunately, the option to turn off the Search function is no longer there in Chrome.
> [...] putting 192.168.0.1 into my browser's search line [...]
That's a "search line" and/or a URL box. How should your browser know whether you want to do a Web search for: 192.168.0.1 or you want to communicate with a web server at: 192.168.0.1 ???
In some cases, like this one, the entry is ambiguous; it could be interpreted as a search term or as a URL (an _incomplete_ URL).
I'd expect a more complete URL to have a better chance of being interpreted as a URL. For example:
When this new Inter-Web thing was new, and web browsers were lame, the user was expected to supply a recognizably complete URL. And, if you wanted to use a search engine, you went explicitly to the search-engine web site, like, say, "http://google.com", and put your search terms into a form there.
Now that everything has been "improved", you can put whatever you want into the URL box (which you might even think of as a "search line"), and the browser will decide whether you have provided a URL or search terms, and act accordingly. This is much more convenient, unless you provide ambiguous stuff, and the browser's decision is not what you expected.
