How to use the hosts file to make google.com resolve to bing.com on a single machine

Question

I am having a little trouble understanding how to manipulate the hosts file. I am using IIS 7.5 and Windows Server 2008 RC2.

How can I make any requests from my machine to google.com resolve to bing.com?

Solution 1

Bing has the following IP: 65.55.175.254

So it would be

65.55.175.254 google.com www.google.com

It will change the url due to redirection on bing's end.. nothing you can do about that

Solution 2

Use nslookup to find an IP address for bing.com. Then add an entry in your hosts file that looks like:

1.2.3.4 google.com www.google.com

Replace the IP address with the IP you found for bing.com.

Keep in mind, though, that there's not one IP address for any of these services that operate at a massive scale, so the IP address you're getting for bing.com or google.com today may not be in use tomorrow.

Comments

[Keith]

Why would you want to do that? Can't you just change the source of the request? Install a new default search provider?

[Jamess]

Flip side, any time bing.com decides to change the IP address, your search will be broken.

[JdeBP]

... or even 20 seconds from now (the TTL on the resource record set visible from here at the time that I write this).