AOL: still providing insanity after all these years

http://rachelbythebay.com/w/2012/08/22/huh/

by protomyth • 14 years ago

99 13 14 years ago

asadpanda• 14 years ago

Well the user searched news not the general web. Not sure how big of an issue this is. AOL site delivers their search results from google anyways.

rachelbythebay• 14 years ago

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.

mcclung• 14 years ago

The first non-ad result for me is mail.aol.com, as it should be.

aswanson• 14 years ago

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.

aphyr2• 14 years ago

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.

pjscott• 14 years ago

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.

baddox• 14 years ago

Of course, there's nothing stopping AOL from doing a POST or PUT request either, or a DELETE for that matter.

lurkinggrue• 14 years ago

AOL is still in business?

drgath• 14 years ago

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.

pkill17• 14 years ago

Much higher than 88%; past year AOL has seen over 150% increase in its stock price.

https://www.google.com/finance?chdnp=1&chdd=1&chds=1...

AOL: still providing insanity after all these years

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