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5 Year Complete AOL Instant Messenger Logs Are No More

As part of a legal settlement with Google, we have agreed to take down the Google Aimsearch pages today (Jan. 14th). We didn't get any money or anything; their lawyers just sent us mail requesting that we take the pages down by Jan. 14th, and we said that we would.

We thought that the site was pretty obviously a parody, but not everyone saw it that way. In fact, we got a fair bit of amusing email from people who fell for the prank.

A lot of people seemed to spend more time writing angry emails, in fact, than they did looking at the pages! Some even threatened to sue if their chat transcripts weren't removed from the log.

The scariest emails were those from people who, you could tell, really wanted to use the search, but couldn't make it work. "I get the same results no matter what usernames I put in," they'd say, frustrated.

Basically, it was a lot of fun, and we're glad we did it, but we don't want to fight any lawsuits, so we're complying with Google's lawyers' requests.

So anway, Thanks! to all who came for a visit, got sweaty palms, and then hopefully a good chuckle or two after realizing it was all a big joke. Thanks for being such good sports.

An even bigger Thanks to those of you who found the "add chat" link buried in the posts and used it to contribute to the parody. You typed in more, and funnier, entries than we ever could have thought of.

If you have no idea what this is all about, we're sorry you missed it. We'll try to link to an archive at some point soon, or perhaps offer a downloadable zip archive. Mail us a link to any archives out there that you know of, and we'll be happy to link to them here.

In summary, thanks very much for playing, and don't forget to use Google for all your Internet searches!