I've been watching my web logs and packet traces for a while.
It appears that a lot of the search engines are really stupid.
The lock in the ip addresses, not the DNS names, of sites that they have
visited.
These search engines appear to keep trying to hit IP addresses that have
not been in service for several months and are failing to re-resolve the
DNS names that would take them to the new location.
Besides being an operational optimization that is rather stupidly
done, this has implications for those trademark folks who think that
obtaining a DNS name from another person necessarily ends the control that
that person has.
One, for instance, could readily keep feeding a search engine all kinds of
stuff long after the domain name has been reassigned and the addresses
changed.
--karl--
