[ Marko Bijelic @ 24.02.2005. 19:20 ] @
| Protect your site from Google’s new toolbar http://www.zeldman.com/daily/0205f.shtml To the delight of gadget freaks and the consternation of some web designers and thinkers, the new Autolink feature in Google’s latest toolbar sticks links on your site that you didn’t put there. For instance, if your company’s site includes a street address, a link to Google’s map service will magically sprout from your page. Likewise, a book’s ISBN number will trigger a link to an Amazon page selling that book. The BBC and CNET cite additional examples. Critics point out that with this technology Google is doing the very thing Microsoft tried to do in 2001. See Chris Kaminski’s “Much Ado About Smart Tags” (A List Apart 22 July 2001) if you missed that drama. Kaminski cited three problems with smart tags: 1. Per Walter Mossberg in The Wall Street Journal, Smart Tags enabled Microsoft to “edit any page on the web without the author’s knowledge.” 2. They extended Microsoft’s monopoly power into new markets, giving the Redmond giant the power to decide which non-Operating System companies would live and which would die. (Companies Microsoft’s Smart Tags division partnered with would live; their competitors would eat worms.) 3. Not least, Smart Tags were “amenable to nefarious uses, such as covert user tracking” (Chris Kaminski in ALA, paraphrasing Dan Gillmor). Google has been a good corporate citizen and outstanding netizen for so long that one wants to give the company the benefit of the doubt. And, to be fair, consumers might derive benefit from Google’s new service — as, indeed, many might have benefited from Smart Tags. But Google’s new toolbar doesn’t solve the three problems cited above. It merely makes Google instead of Microsoft the arbiter of life and death in the information space. You can’t stop a juggernaut in pursuit of its own increase, but you can do something about the part where they mess with your website, adding links you didn’t create. Namely, you can download this script from Threadwatch, install said script on your server, and link to it from the <head> of your web pages. Drew McLellan explains how it works: The script cycles through all the links in the page and removes any that are found to have been placed there by Google. Obviously, the more links your page contains, the more work the script must do. Client-side wear and tear could go away like a bad dream if Google would do what Microsoft did with Smart Tags: namely, provide a meta tag that disables them. Please note that the toolbar is still in beta; the company is soliciting consumer feedback. (You might ask Google to turn off Autolink by default and/or to provide site owners and developers with a meta tag that disables it.) Like previous Google toolbars, this one works only in Internet Explorer and only on the Windows platform, but most of its real benefits, such as popup blocking and in-toolbar Google Search, are freely available to Safari and Firefox users, whose browsers do these things without the need for a commercial add-on. Linkovi: http://www.google.com/support/...n/static.py?page=features.html http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/4287539.stm http://news.com.com/Googles+li...nline/2100-1032_3-5582792.html http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/02/20/1926227 http://www.alistapart.com/articles/smarttags/ |