[Mailman-Developers] Re: GET vs POST (was Re: subscription confirmations)

[J C Lawrence]

On Thu, 19 Jul 2001 00:29:22 -0400 
Jay R Ashworth <jra@baylink.com> wrote:

> A URL with a "?" character in it is known to be dynamic -- that
> is, it's *expected* not to return the same content, depending on
> what parameter it's given; this is why search engines customarily
> ignore them... and it what I meant by "magic", in the context in
> which I was using it.

This presumed fact would seem a myth.  Kanga.Nu has circa 150K web
pages of which between one third and one half have URL variables
('?' in the URL). __ALL__ of those pages are regularly (evey month)
and repeatedly indexed by Google, Inktomi etc.  Actually at this
point I'm not aware of any english language search engine which
doesn't index Kanga.Nu (encluding those pages), and I know its also
indexed by several foreign language search engines as well.

Simple example:

  http://www.google.com/search?q=beej+site%3Awww.kanga.nu

First hit:

  http://www.kanga.nu/library/index.php3?viewCat=10

A dynamically generated page whose content depends on the value of
"viewCat".

  Aside: The Library At Kanga.Nu (of which that is a page) is
  largely offline currently due to DB corruption (MySQL has been
  eating its own databases and I've not had a chance to restore from
  backups).  Please don't email me asking why or telling me that all
  the root categories are missing.  Yeah, I know.

-- 
J C Lawrence                                    )\._.,--....,'``.	    
---------(*)                                   /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
claw@kanga.nu                                 `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'
http://www.kanga.nu/~claw/                     Oh Freddled Gruntbuggly