Browsers having difficulty with Google and Apple websites

I have iGoogle set as my homepage. Sometimes something weird happens when I go to it: in Camino, it gives me a pop-up saying "The URL is not valid and cannot be loaded"; in Safari, it just tells me that the website is not available. This extends to Google News and everything else Google, not just the search engine. This same problem also occurs when going to www.apple.com. Every other website seems to work fine, and I haven't changed anything within the past day or so.

In addition, typing in www.apple.com/macosx or something seems to delete the www.apple.com portion and return "http://macosx/", which of course doesn't load. So my thought is that something is causing the browser to ignore "www.google.com" and "www.apple.com" as if that part of the address didn't exist?

What could this possibly be?

Also: just to make this clear, it isn't constant. Re-trying a few times allows me to access both Google and Apple. It seems to be random as and when it fails.

This is a strange one ... hmmnn .... was there a prior time before this wierdness when your Homepage was set to be iGoogle and all was well?

What if you change your Homepage, does this madness prevail?

I haven't been able to find out much relating to this issue .... if the change in Homepage fixes things then that is the only solution at this point in time ...

Try http://apple.com and http://google.com - missing out the www in both cases.

Also try and load them in a different browser - if you get the same symptom in another browser it is your ISP - probably caused by a proxy/routing issue.

Thanks, it seems to have fixed itself overnight, so possibly an ISP thing. It was the same with both Safari and Camino, as well. The homepage had nothing to do with it, it was the same for both sites regardless of whether it was my homepage or not (and I've never had Apple as my homepage). It was perfectly fine before yesterday. I did some searching and came up with similar situations of other people who have encountered the same problem, all Mac users. Anyway, it seems to fix itself with time, though it has been going on for a long period (some of the other reported instances were in '06), so whatever it is seems to keep coming back.

If it is the same in more than one browser, it is ISP related - DNS/proxy or routing could all be the cause. Windows users suffer the same symptoms too. You can use open DNS or set a proxy up next time and you will be able to view the sites.