The answer will only SLIGHTLY differ by the operating system you are using.
I'm running Ubuntu on a powerpc :p but in general the same rules apply on windows and mac as well. If these instructions do not work for you then I will adapt this answer for your OS. For now here is the Linux method.
The only way I have found after hours of searching, to do this, is to install privoxy.
Once you install privoxy you need to edit the /etc/privoxy/config file in the following manner:
1) Find where it says
#listen-address localhost:8118
and uncomment this line so that it says
listen-address localhost:8118
2) Add the following lines to the bottom of this config file:
actionsfile blacklist.action
actionsfile whitelist.action
3) Now you need to create these action files in a text editor as root:
a) gksu gedit /etc/privoxy/blacklist.action
and add the following
{ +block }
www.apple.com/itunes
twil.tv/category/video
www.url.com/page
anything you add under the {+block} line will be blocked
b) Respectively you should create the whitelist.action file
gksu gedit /etc/privoxy/whitelist.action
and add the lines
{ -block }
www.google.com
or whatever you find privoxy blocking that you want to protect.
After you have saved the three files you have to restart privoxy:
sudo /etc/init.d/privoxy restart
and you have to make sure that your proxy settings in your browser or in your network configurations are correct, adding localhost as the proxy and 8118 as the port number will be all you need.
The SERIOUS and UNFORTUNATE drawbacks to privoxy is that it is a proxy so all anyone needs to do to stop it working is turn it off, or use a different browser. I am still searching for a way to add privoxy to my router or to somehow run it , not as a proxy, but as my default on port 80, then you could lock down the config files so that no one could change them.
This is the closest you will find to an answer to your problem.
If it doesn't appear to be working at first don't forget to flush your browser's cache because the pages you have blocked may show up from cache even after they have been blocked.
also you might want to turn this off:
make sure that enforce-blocks 1 is set to 1 in the /etc/privoxy/config file
enforce-blocks 1
Otherwise, when the page blocked warning comes up, it will have an option to go to the blocked page anyways despite being blocked and completely make privoxy meaningless.
Best Answer
This will not work unfortunately. Hosts files are used to resolve IPs to domain and host names... not full URLs. The reason is that it is designed to resolve the names and IPs of hosts on a network (eg yourmachine.yourdomain.local or similar) - and is often confuised with web URLs.
It may also be worth noting that by editing your hosts file, you only mess up someones ability to resolve www.google.com to 173.194.41.146 (according to my ping anyway). If your user used a web-ping to find the ip and then went to
http://173.194.41.146, they would still get through to Google!there is no effective way to do this within windows natively, so you need to start looking into installing some sort of web-proxy on your PC (or a dedicated server) if doing this corporately.