Quote:
Originally Posted by Kal
You are confusing the google websearch company with the google "we sell advertisements on your webpage to make money" company  |
Yes that would be right
Quote:
Originally Posted by Kal
Google uses a webcrawler to browse the web and index data, this is called googlebot.
|
Yes - there are many bots other than Googlebot. They just harvest online content for the indexing... and also some naughty ones who don't play by the rules but I haven't heard of any bot going through a local machine. I guess it's still possible if the user has a poorly configured local web server and no firewall.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Kal
Google uses shared code on websites and cookies on your machine to track your browsing pattern on the web, this is google analytics.
|
Analytics is used to get a minimal info about your machine. OS, browser used and a couple of other things (from your internet browser only). It is javascript based and not intrusive. The data is logged for the benefit of the person maintaining the website you are browsing.
On the other end the Google Toolbar in your browser will track your browsing habits and do more nasty things locally. Even when turned off. Get a firewall and see how many times it's trying to connect to Google, even with your browser not running
Quote:
Originally Posted by Kal
You do not even have to visit google.com for this data collection to occur, you just need to visit a page with the google analytics code implemented. About half of the worlds top 10,000 webpages have google analytics code written into their webpages.
|
Again Analytics are fairly benign and only report traffic. The toolbars are the problem.