Disable upgrading of single-word addresses in Safari

Question

When entering a single word domain (ie. example/, http://example/ or http://example:8080), in Safari on macOS, Safari will sometimes change it to http://www.example.com. I suspect this is a feature designed to help inapt users, but it kicks in at unwanted times, and I don't want this feature!

It seems like this is dependent on some kind of caching (possibly DNS), so that if Safari first decides to change it, it will keep changing it no matter how many times I type it correctly. But after maybe a few hours, it will do as I expect.

How do I disable this pesky "smart URL conversion" feature?

Answer 1

Here, you are actually searching for a word in your default search engine and go to the first hit. You can either type http:// before your host name or if you have control over that host name, try to change it to example.local or similar which contains a dot (.).

Also, after the first use if http://example to visit that page (putting http:// manually), next time you will be able to use the hostname without the hassle to put `http' first. Till you remove it from history.