Death to spying toolbars; use a scraper service instead

[Everyman]

Toolbars should be discouraged. Here's a proxy that fetches Google's PageRank, Alexa's traffic rank, calculates the daily unique visitors based on the Alexa rank, and shows the count of external backlinks from Yahoo. All in one click (http://www.microsoft-watch.org/cgi-bin/ranking.htm).

[seobook]

fun stuff.

although i guess now the new microsoft-watch is going to take the competitive edge away from my msn-watch :(

only time will tell whos watch is better :)

[gvenditto]

I've never understood why anyone pays attention to Alexa rankings.

I tried out a number of sites with this tool and compared it to the actual log results.

The daily estimate of traffic was not close -- not even within several hundred percent of the actual number.

[bazac]

@ Everyman; Toolbars should be discouraged.

May I ask why?

Daniel Bazac
New York

[I, Brian]

Because they are spyware.

[JohnScott]

I've never understood why anyone pays attention to Alexa rankings.

I tried out a number of sites with this tool and compared it to the actual log results.

The daily estimate of traffic was not close -- not even within several hundred percent of the actual number.


I tried several sites in that, most were waaaay off. But I did find one that was within a dozen UV.

Alexa traffic rank for concrete-home.com = 393350
A rough estimate of daily unique visitors based on this Alexa rank = 561
www.alexa.com/data/details/?url=concrete-home.com

The external backlink count for this page in Yahoo = 85
link:http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=linkdomain%3Awww.concrete-home.com+-site%3Awww.concrete-home.com&ei=UTF-8&fr=FP-tab-web-t&fl=0&x=wrt


Comparing that to actual average of 574 uv daily.

[bazac]

Which toolbar/s from the following list do you think are spyware?

http://dir.yahoo.com/Computers_and_Internet/Software/Internet/World_Wide_Web/Browsers/Utilities/Search_Toolbars/

Obviously I expect some kind of proof to back-up your statements.

Such as:

Google And The Big Brother Nomination

http://searchenginewatch.com/sereport/article.php/2175251#spyware

Daniel Bazac
New York

[I, Brian]

Which toolbar/s from the following list do you think are spyware?

http://dir.yahoo.com/Computers_and_Internet/Software/Internet/World_Wide_Web/Browsers/Utilities/Search_Toolbars/

Obviously I expect some kind of proof to back-up your statements.

Such as:

Google And The Big Brother Nomination

http://searchenginewatch.com/sereport/article.php/2175251#spyware

Daniel Bazac
New York
Bazac - it's simple.

With the Google toolbar, for instance, with advanced reporting on (to allow the PageRank value of pages to show), you effectively send Google a record of all of the pages that you are surfing.

Whilst the privacy may exist to prevent personal identification of individuals, what it otherwise does is provide a clear record of user habits: so that a billion-dollar company can get free market research information on the user base*. That's spyware.

A lot of spyware is actually very legitimate - sometimes bundled with other free software applications, only for the user to then rescind on the original software agreement and seek to get the bait without the hook - ie, the other software, without spyware.

Adware, browser hijackers, and other unauthorised software installations, are a different ball game.

Personally, I surf my own sites with IE with Toolbar and advanced features on. I want Google to know about my own sites and pages I visit there. Everything else is done on a clean Firefox, for general user-protection and security purposes.


* And all just so that people can look at a little green line. :)

[bazac]

@ I, Brian

Regarding Google it's clear, thank you.

BTW, what Google' official position regarding these accusations?

You can also see:

Feedback requested: A proposal to help fight deceptive Inter
http://www.searchguild.com/tpage10926-0.html

What about OTHER toolbars?

Daniel

[I, Brian]

For the most part, the big concerns are about privacy - more specifically, "Can I be personally identified from the information sent". The answer there in the most part would almost certainly be no - the search engines want the user behaviour patterns primarily.

An exception is the A9 search engine, which apparently integrates with personal information from Amazon. That *is* personally identifiable information, is that setting is used.