Ouch. Check this out.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/4605202.stm

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/world/asia-pacific/4605202.stm

Same document. Same content. Just different layout in the navbar. This is a bad way to do A/B testing. They need to do this based on cookies!

It’s always amazing to find these little edge conditions. I’ve been writing robots/spiders for years and it never ceases to amaze me how much crazy stuff people will put into production.


  1. Matthew Hurst

    Kevin,

    AFAIK, the Beeb has done this since time immemorial - it is not new.

  2. Kevin Burton

    Thanks Matthew. You learn something new everyday. I guess I’ll have to write a custom URL canonicalizer for them. There are a few other mainstream sites I’ve had to do this with as well.

    Kevin

  3. Radovan Janecek

    What is so bad with two URLs identifying one resource?

  4. Jim Ley

    Doing it with cookies would also mean that the non-cookie’d person could ever see the other format, that’s not exactly a good thing.

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