I'm in the UK studying, and I use AOL Instant messenger to communicate with my mom,usually on a daily basis. The computers at the university don't have AIM installed, so I use AIM Express. The thing is, Express stopped working from the aol UK site. I found a way to get to the aol.com site through google, but I was wondering, what makes Internet explorer automatically redirect me from aol.com to aol.co.uk? It happens in similar fashions with google and other multinational websites.

I think it has something to do with your ISP, possibly the site checks where it's located and then loads the different country sites. When I tried downloading the html code of www.google.com I got the code for www.google.nl so I think the .com site is only redirects with the info they can get from your address. If I ask for my info on IRC I get something like 'some numbers (not my IP)@chello.nl' I think they use that to redirect

<span style="color: lightblue">There should usually be a link somewhere to override that - for example, google.com.au has a link "Go to google.com", and that stops the auto redirect. Google.com then has a link "Go to google australia", which reverses that.

For the AOL site you can go to the AOL international link at the bottom and then choose USA.

yeah, i figured out how to get to the AIM express site, bypassing the main page for both aol.com and aol.co.uk. It was just a little irritating at times, you know? Thanks for you help.