== Google Desktop and conditional GET (part 2)

When I start grumpily thinking of ways to punish a program's bad
behavior is about when it sinks in that I don't like it. Which means
that Google Desktop has a problem.

Back in December I wrote about [[Google Desktop and conditional GET
GoogleDesktopAndCondGet]] and concluded that I didn't have enough
evidence to really know what the heck was going on. Well, I have several
months more data and more people using Google Desktop against me, and
I've reached a conclusion: ~~Google Desktop doesn't do conditional
GET~~.

Most of the time it doesn't even bother trying, never sending
_If-Modified-Since:_ and _If-None-Match:_ headers despite making
repeated requests for the same Atom feed. A few clients sent the
headers, but never updated them when DWiki returned updated information.
One client has been sending an I-M-S header of 'Sun, 19 Feb 2006
10:44:42 GMT' for the past month, all the while getting updates;
interestingly, it *did* change the _If-None-Match:_ header, but
now hasn't updated it since February 25th.

Here's a table about the requests since February 21st:

| Total requests | 304 result	| 200 result	| Even tried
| 3180		 | 5		| 3175		| 715

(The 'even tried' category is any request that had an I-M-S or
I-N-M, no matter how crazy.)

These are not casual visitors; 19 different IP addresses requested
at least one feed ten times or more. The most prolific one asked
for one feed 597 times, and *never* included an I-M-S or I-N-M
header.

Not supporting conditional GET when fetching syndication feeds
is bad. Not supporting it in something you expect to be widely
deployed is really bad. I really had hoped for more from Google.

(As always, the disclaimer: I like having readers and we have plenty
of bandwidth. This is absolutely not a request for people using Google
Desktop to stop reading WanderingThoughts.)