[Citation needed] Microsoft has a huge R&D division, larger than any other company in the industry has. Their patents are invalid, they're good patents given after lots of research. Microsoft spends billions a year to do it, so it's only fair that other companies pay up if they want to profit from the results of Microsoft's R&D.

They need to game other search engines. And why would they try to rank "google"? They're trying to rank Chrome's download page.

Who says I'm not a subscriber? Because I am.

So I provide a valid opinion and reasons why it's good to do web development with and it gets modded to -1? WTF Slashdot?

PHP is fine, but if you want to learn about a better, enterprise-ready languages I would suggest using ASP.NET. It integrates perfectly with .NET apps and libraries and comes with a comprehensive library (as it uses .NET). The great thing about ASP.NET is that you can use C# to develop for it. ASP.NET also comes with various functions to make state management easier - an important feature that is completely missing in other languages. It also has built-in cache management.

ASP.NET originally lacked templating engine, but Microsoft introduced it in 2.0 version. You can have master templates that have placeholders for the dynamic content, as well as all the HTML and JavaScript that is shared between all pages.

It is basically more than your off-the-shelf PHP/Python/Ruby. ASP.NET provides much larger library to use, has templating engine, error handling, controls and events (and hence is more familiar to Windows developers), caching, object-oriented design and session control which can even be saved in SQL Server. It's not just a language, it's the complete package.

One of the great things about ASP.NET is also that you can use your favorite language to develop for it, as long as it supports .NET. This means you can use VB.NET, C#, J#, Delphi.NET etc. And because you compile the code to bytecode, it runs significantly faster. On top of that Visual Studio is a great free (and commercial) development environment.

Oh, and if you want to run ASP.NET under Linux servers, it's easy too. Apache has mod_mono module or you can use it via FastCGI.

Session ID needs to be in the URL because otherwise every page request would be POST, and that will break lots of functionality. Usually session id goes to cookie, and regardless, they're almost always bound to IP and other information. You can't just copy that session id and log in. It has no effect on security in standard environments (and if you do custom stuff like reverse proxying you need to handle many things anyway), and sessions provide good functionality.

The default is GET because it's better in most cases, like in your example with Google query. This lets people link to pages, bookmark them, let search engines index them and lets user go back and forward in history. POST breaks all that and should only be used when there's actual need for them, like when filling actual forms. In most cases they're used perfectly good.