Ebil Angelfire?

[Jeysie]

At the risk of sounding dumb - how can you tell what searches came up with your site? where does it get logged?

Basically, every time your browser accesses a page, it keeps track of several different bits of information, including what URL you were at right before you went to the page. Depending on how your browser settings are, your browser sends all that info to the web server it's accessing, and the web server keeps a log of it.

If you're allowed access to your site's referrer logs (you'll generally need paid webspace for this... most ISPs/free webspace providers/educational places won't offer this), you can read through the logs to find out all this information... everything from IPs, to sites that link to you, to search strings, to what browsers and OSs people use, etc.

Of course, the logs are designed for machines, so you likely wouldn't want to read the raw log yourself. Instead, there's different kinds of software that will process the raw info into something more human-scannable. Most paid web services will have some software installed on their servers that you can access online to check your info. My provider uses cPanel, and has "Webalizer", "AwStats", and "Analog" available.

If you don't have access to your referrer logs, a service like Nedstat can give a taste of some of this info, but it's not as thorough as a real referrer log.

(If you want to find out exactly what sort of info your browser sends out, and get all paranoid, you can check out this site. )

Peace & Luv, Liz

[Louisiana Night]

I've seen a lot of those things. They only seem to get about half of my information. I think it's because my OS is in BAD shape.

[Storm]

(If you want to find out exactly what sort of info your browser sends out, and get all paranoid, you can check out this site. )

I knew about the browser sending all that information, but for some reason I assumed it only sends the domain name and not the entire address... learn something new every day

BTW, that link didn't show my OS, and said I was using Mozilla/4.0, though I'm using IE6

[Jeysie]

BTW, that link didn't show my OS, and said I was using Mozilla/4.0, though I'm using IE6

I have no idea about that first. As for the latter... for one, Mozilla has technically always been around as a browser... IIRC, it was the first graphical browser. Netscape then sort of evolved from Mozilla. (Then Mozilla sort of re-evolved from Netscape, but that's a whole other ball of wax.) So Netscape has always identified itself as Mozilla.

For two, *Netscape* used to be the most prevalent browser. Microsoft didn't like this, so it started trying to market its own browser. Because many sites at the time were coded specifically for Netscape, M$ made its new browser identify itself partly as "Mozilla compatible" so websites wouldn't lock it out using scripts or whatnot. Why M$ still has IE do that, I don't know, but the net result is that "Mozilla" is always part of an IE identity string.

Just to make matters more confusing, Opera can spoof itself as different browsers for the same reason (because clueless webmasters use scripts to lock it out), and I think Firefox actually has an extension to spoof itself as well. Of course, if more webmasters would check browsers according to their *capabilities* rather than their header strings, we wouldn't need all this spoof crap, but that's a whole other rant.

Peace & Luv, Liz

[Storm]

That site must be pretty old then... I've seen other pages that can tell I'm using IE6 and WinXP

BTW, Mosaic is usually referred to as the first graphical browser... and from what I gather, NS, IE and Mozilla are all based on it

[Jeysie]

You're right, it *was* Mosaic. Blargh, stupid memory. The rest of it is still basically accurate, though.

As for the "smartness" of the site... since spoofing is used so much, log software either simply lists the entire browser header, or is "smart" enough to know what part of the header is the "real" browser. I guess that one is neither. It was just the first likely site of that type I found on Google.

Peace & Luv, Liz

[Oldbushie]

Lol, weird people out there! I haven't seen any loogie boys myself though...