AOL does a lot of weird things. Last year, jrecursive actually observed that their servers would make an HTTP GET for any URL passed over an AIM conversation. Looks like that doesn't happen any more, though.
The moral of that story is, don't do anything in response to a GET request that you don't want randomly triggered by bots. That's what POST and PUT are for.
By that logic, there's nothing stopping AOL bots from flooding your domain with TCP SYN requests and taking you down. It would be sinful, but it's possible.
The point of standards is to provide a place for people to meet each other halfway. Protocol standards especially.
Sure, they did do a news search, but it also fails at that. How do any of those results fulfill that request? My post did not contain the word "AOL" at all. My only post with that particular sequence of characters before this morning was one from April 21st which talked about the decline of empires, Netscape being eaten, and all of that as seen in Coders at Work.
People are going to do web searches for things which make no sense to technical types. We can either roll our eyes at them (or worse), or we can accept them as a quirk of the human condition and create systems which will provide an acceptable experience even though they don't "get" the web the way we do.
I'm not sure, but I think the latter one might be far more profitable.
AOL continuously highjacks my default browser search (firefox, I search from the field these days) to their annoying wrapper-over-google search engine. The inanity is widespread.
Very much so. If you are the average HN reader, odds are likely you visit AOL sites on a daily basis. Also, the stock is up 88% over the last 12-months.
But, I feel like they've given up on being anything other than an SEO / blogging / display advertising sweat-shop. Although it seems to be working for them.
