New Stuff at DMOZ and Alexa Ramblings

Dec 13, 2003 - 2:09 am 0 by
Filed Under DMOZ

Not really all that useful, but noticed DMOZ has a red button in it's categories now (bottom right), which shows thumbnails of the websites in the category.

It also looks like some coder over at Amazon or Alexa (same company, so whatever...) got bored and added a few minor things:

  • Shows average time it takes to load a page
  • Reviews were wiped out (although "star" ranking remains), and new reviews are now "Amazon" reviews instead of Alexa reviews
  • Shows what percentage of sessions show popups
  • Sccreenshot update form works now on non IE for Windows (now it's simply a link instead of a form)
  • 3 month average traffic ranking seems to be updating more frequently than once a week on Monday

Speaking of Alexa... I got bored the other day and busted out the packet sniffer to see what it's actually doing when sending/receiving data to the Alexa servers, and it doesn't have a checksum (like the Google toolbar uses for getting PageRank). It does have a cookie which seems to be embedded, but it the lack of the cookie doesn't prevent you from getting data, which you can see by clicking here (you will need to view the source since it's XML... unless of course your browser supports XML natively).

And to answer the question on a lot of your minds, no... you can't spoof Alexa traffic by simply pulling the URL (I tested it already). Maybe it's the missing cookie data or something... and I'm sure if someone wanted to do it badly enough they could figure out how to, but I didn't really care about that part of it... I was mostly just curious about how it worked.

 

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