3 ms·
All search engines look for keywords in URLs. That's why domain names with keywords in them are more expensive. If you're going to mine clickstreams from the to
by wrs 16y ago
All search engines look for keywords in URLs. That's why domain names with keywords in them are more expensive. If you're going to mine clickstreams from the toolbar, it's not far-fetched to think you would mine the entire source URL, including the query string, for keywords. Then there would be no need to postulate special treatment for Google search URLs, since the keyword is in plain sight (google.com?q=xxxxxx).
If that is what's happening, then the moral/ethical argument against Microsoft would have to be that they should treat Google specially, by explicitly ignoring clicks on Google's result pages. That seems to me to open up quite a can of worms.
- lysium 16y agoI'm wondering, if this is really the case, why does Microsoft not just point that out, but instead comes with ad hominem arguments?
- las3rjock 16y agoTo crawl Google URLs of the form google.com?q=x would be to disregard http://www.google.com/robots.txt http://www.google.com/robots.txt , which seems like bad netiquette to me.
- wrs 16y agoThey aren't crawling, just noticing what pages clients who visit google.com?q=xxx go to next. If anybody's search toolbar checks a site's robots.txt before sending clickstream data, I would be very surprised. A client-side robots.txt rule would also make anti-phishing features trivial to bypass...just put a robots.txt on your phishing site.