cmuskett Posted May 11, 2003 Share Posted May 11, 2003 I was just checking my recent visitors in CPanel and came across this entry: Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; grub-client-1.2.1; Crawl your own stuff with http://grub.org). I went to the site and it says: Improve Web Search from Your Desktop! -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 1,041 clients running - crawling 77,596,682 URLs in the last 24 hours. Does this mean that anyone can download this program like the robots do?? I don't know if I like this or not... This is the entire entry from my CPanel: Host: 64.241.242.18 Url: / Http Code : 200 Date: May 10 23:53:56 Http Version: HTTP/1.1 Size in Bytes: 7833 Referer: - Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; grub-client-1.2.1; Crawl your own stuff with http://grub.org) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
SEO Posted May 11, 2003 Share Posted May 11, 2003 Grub ... borrowing your computer's spare clock cycles. Meaning you are contributing the bandwidth and processor time required for crawling the Internet. Now that may not be such a bad idea, what bothers me is that this is LookSmart. LookSmart charges for listings... now does that make sense? "Ask people to crawl for us and then we will charge for both submission to the index and charge for the rankings ... what a great business model!" On many levels, I can not stand this company! (that is the first time I have used that emoticon, which should tell you something). Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
leezard Posted May 11, 2003 Share Posted May 11, 2003 sounds like thats the same type of "toolbar" that you can get at alexa.com only diference is alexa doesnt charge for listings Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
SEO Posted May 12, 2003 Share Posted May 12, 2003 Regarding Alexa.com's toolbar (from their own pages): ALEXA'S TOOLBAR SERVICE COLLECTS AND STORES INFORMATION ABOUT THE WEB PAGES YOU VIEW, THE DATA YOU ENTER IN ONLINE FORMS AND SEARCH FIELDS, AND, WITH VERSIONS 5.0 AND HIGHER, THE PRODUCTS YOU PURCHASE ONLINE WHILE USING THE TOOLBAR SERVICE. ALTHOUGH ALEXA DOES NOT ATTEMPT TO ANALYZE WEB USAGE DATA TO DETERMINE THE IDENTITY OF ANY ALEXA USER, SOME INFORMATION COLLECTED BY THE TOOLBAR SERVICE IS PERSONALLY IDENTIFIABLE. ALEXA AGGREGATES AND ANALYZES THE INFORMATION IT COLLECTS TO IMPROVE ITS SERVICE AND TO PREPARE REPORTS ABOUT AGGREGATE WEB USAGE AND SHOPPING HABITS. IN ADDITION, WHEN YOU PERFORM SEARCHES USING THE SEARCH FUNCTION AVAILABLE ON ALEXA'S TOOLBAR SERVICE SOFTWARE VERSION 6.5 AND HIGHER OR ON THE ALEXA WEBSITE, YOU OFTEN WILL BE TAKEN TO A WEBSITE DETAIL PAGE AT AMAZON.COM. IF YOU HAVE AN ACCOUNT ON AMAZON.COM AND AN AMAZON.COM COOKIE ENABLED, YOUR SEARCH RESULTS WILL BE TRANSMITTED TO AND LOGGED BY AMAZON.COM AND MAY BE CORRELATED BY AMAZON.COM WITH ANY PERSONALLY IDENTIFIABLE INFORMATION YOU MAY HAVE PREVIOUSLY PROVIDED TO AMAZON.COM. Way too much 'big brother' for me. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Lianna Posted May 12, 2003 Share Posted May 12, 2003 AdAware! Great free spyware protection. Alexa has a target on its back and AdAware will kill it quickly. Too much Big Brother? That's not a brother, it's a violation of my privacy and done without my consent. Alexa users beware the data being shared about you and your browsing habits. (And I don't use that emoticon much either!) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
KevinW Posted May 12, 2003 Share Posted May 12, 2003 FWIW -- Alexa actually comes installed with Windows XP/IE6! Microsoft uses it for what they call 'Related Links'. But if you don't use that feature, nothing is ever reported. I point that out because you may run Adaware and it may report Alexa, but that does NOT mean that it is actually activated or doing anything. Read more about it at: http://www.safersite.com/PestInfo/a/alexa_adware.asp http://www.imilly.com/alexa.htm Shoot, Microsoft even pushes it on their web site --- take a look at: http://www.microsoft.com/windows/ie/previo...ess/default.asp -kw Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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