AOL mangling dynamic URLs

same search on Google comes up correctly

[Finder]

Noticed a strange request from an AOL Search user in the logs. Where the URL should have been

/foo/?section=blah&sub=misc

it was actually

/foo/?section=blah&sub=misc

The problem is that the latter URL isn't going to show the same page as the former since PHP discards everything after "blah" in the malformed URL. The same link in Google, for the same keywords, comes up correctly in the SERPS. I only recently started encoding my ampersands in my HTML.

Is this a problem on my end, or AOL's?

[jeremy goodrich]

I saw a request like that in my logs, too. AOL it seems is mistreating the HTML encoding on some dynamic links...

The only suggestion I'd have is using mod_rewrite if you are on an apache server with that installed, I understand there are options for IIS too, but I'm not familiar with those myself. :)

[Finder]

Whew, I'm glad it's not something I did wrong! If AOL can't even handle an encoded ampersand... well, they need more help than I can provide. ;) The page they end up with isn't an error page, it's just one level above the page that showed up in the SERPS. Being AOL users I'm sure they are used to worse strangeness than that!