google

AOL has always been an easy target for ridicule. So, when I found out today that AOL was trying to take on gmail with a new public beta mail service, I jumped at the opprotunity to test it out.

I was disappointed to find out that AOL did a number of things right with their new service; in many ways, I'd say its superior to gmail. Namely, AOL's webmail wins hands down in terms of:

• Overall user experience
• Overall design

However, even by the most charitable measures, AOL's webmail still loses to google. The first reason being:

As soon as I switched over to this new theme my search engine traffic plummeted. I was beginning to suspect that the spiders had confused the javascript that generates the markup for this theme's curves with an attempt to show two pages: one for spiders, one for humans. As it turns out however, it was a test site that I had forgotten to delete that was also showing Nick Lewis: the blog.

So google found the test site, and apparently knocked my search engine traffic in half. This morning I removed the test site, and my search engine traffic doubled, and is now at normal levels once again.