When did Dogpile become the default search for boston.com?

By [email protected] on Thu, 04/09/2009 - 4:05pm

Did I miss something? What page do you get when you browse to http://movies.boston.com/?

I now get a Dogpile semi-custom search page with vaugely-relevant links to movies playing nowadays. Why don't I get sent to the page I want, at http://www.boston.com/ae/movies/ ?

Did I miss the discussion when they switched some of their subdomains (only select ones, since http://cars.boston.com/ is not found)? Or is this such old news that I've forgotten it.

(Hey - didn't it used to be ae.boston.com? Or am I losing my mind?)

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Comments

Boston.com "partner" sites and virtual hosts

By langmead on Thu, 04/09/2009 - 10:20pm.

Doing an DNS lookup on movies.boston.com shows that it is hb.zip2.com. Boston.com probably has or had them host their movies.

A lot of "boston.com"'s content isn't actually their own, but is outsourced to other companies. Their automotive site is really cars.com. Their Real Estate re.boston.com is someone else's (or pretty much any *.boston.com page that you see that is an .asp page) Finance.boston.com is financial.content.com, Death Notices are legacy.com, etc.

Most of these vendors will add a boston.com shell around the page when accessed as *.boston.com, a different header and footer when accessed as chicagotribune.com, etc.

The site ae.boston.com is different. Its hosted at the same place as www.boston.com, but a different server or set of servers. (or was. Nothing seems to be responding there now.) Many of those were producing dynamic responses to requests and was a little too heavyweight to run on the same server that ran www.boston.com. Many of those other servers (ae.boston.com, realestate.boston.com, digitalmass.boston.com, etc.) went away when boston.com's content was moved to the content management system they built for themselves. (since the CMS did some of the same dynamic functions that the older sites did.)